Instana OpenTelemetry Rust

Overview

Instana OpenTelemetry Rust is based on Open Source OpenTelemetry Rust. It provides an OpenTelemetry implementation which focuses on supporting Instana OpenTelemetry and IBM platforms (S390X Linux, PowerPC Linux, AIX) as well as other platforms (Linux x64/ARM64 and Windows).

It includes standard features which provide a collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs used to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces) for analysis in order to understand your software's performance and behavior.

In addition to standard features of OpenTelemetry Rust, Instana OpenTelemetry Rust also provides Instana OpenTelemetry Rust SDK which supports exporter, propagation and serialization. It allows you to send OpenTelemetry trace data to Instana for monitoring and observability. See Instana Opentelemetry Rust SDK for more details.

Project Status

The table below summarizes the overall status of each component. Some components include unstable features, which are documented in their respective crate documentation.

Signal/Component	Overall Status
Context	Beta
Baggage	RC
Propagators	Beta
Logs-API	Stable*
Logs-SDK	Stable
Logs-OTLP Exporter	RC
Logs-Appender-Tracing	Stable
Metrics-API	Stable
Metrics-SDK	Stable
Metrics-OTLP Exporter	RC
Traces-API	Beta
Traces-SDK	Beta
Traces-OTLP Exporter	Beta

*OpenTelemetry Rust is not introducing a new end user callable Logging API. Instead, it provides Logs Bridge API, that allows one to write log appenders that can bridge existing logging libraries to the OpenTelemetry log data model. The following log appenders are available:

• opentelemetry-appender-log
• opentelemetry-appender-tracing

If you already use the logging APIs from above, continue to use them, and use the appenders above to bridge the logs to OpenTelemetry. If you are using a library not listed here, feel free to contribute a new appender for the same.

If you are starting fresh, we recommend using tracing as your logging API. It supports structured logging and is actively maintained. OpenTelemetry itself uses tracing for its internal logging.

Getting Started

Download and Build

The Instana OpenTelemetry Rust is available in source as tar.gz or zip file which can be downloaded from releases.

Before building from source, make sure the following tools are installed:

• Rust 1.86 or above (Note: Only Rust 1.86 is tested on AIX)
• gcc/g++ 13.0.0 (or above) (Linux, AIX), set environment variable CC to gcc and CXX to g++
• openssl develop package (Linux, AIX), set environment variable OPENSSL_DIR and OPENSSL_LIB_DIR to point to the openssl installation directory and openssl library directory respectively.

To build everything, run:

cargo build --release

Using the crates

There are two ways to use the crates:

1. Use path to the crate in your Cargo.toml: for example:

[dependencies]
<crate-name> = { path = "<path-to-the-root-of-source>" } 

2. Install the crates locally by using cargo install:

cargo install --path <path-to-the-root-of-source>

Examples provided in opentelemetry-instana

The examples in opentelemetry-instana folder show how to use instana opentelemetry exporter to send trace data to Instana. See details in examples/README.md.

Examples for using IDOT (Instana Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector)

Examples are also provided for sending trace data through IDOT (Instana Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector) with OpenTelemetry Rust SDK. See base-otlp on IDOT and basic-otlp-http on IDOT for more details.

Overview of crates

The following crates are maintained in this repo:

• [opentelemetry-instana] This is the Instana Opentelemetry Rust SDK which supports exporter, propagation and serialization. It allows you to send OpenTelemetry trace data to Instana for monitoring and observability
• [opentelemetry] This is the OpenTelemetry API crate, and is the crate required to instrument libraries and applications. It contains Context API, Baggage API, Propagators API, Logging Bridge API, Metrics API, and Tracing API.
• [opentelemetry-sdk] This is the OpenTelemetry SDK crate, and contains the official OpenTelemetry SDK implementation. It contains Logging SDK, Metrics SDK, and Tracing SDK. It also contains propagator implementations.
• [opentelemetry-otlp] - exporter to send telemetry (logs, metrics and traces) in the OTLP format to an endpoint accepting OTLP. This could be the OTel Collector, telemetry backends like Jaeger,
• [opentelemetry-stdout] exporter for sending logs, metrics and traces to stdout, for learning/debugging purposes.
• [opentelemetry-http] This crate contains utility functions to help with exporting telemetry, propagation, over [http].
• [opentelemetry-appender-log] This crate provides logging appender to route logs emitted using the log crate to opentelemetry.
• [opentelemetry-appender-tracing] This crate provides logging appender to route logs emitted using the tracing crate to opentelemetry.
• [opentelemetry-semantic-conventions] provides standard names and semantic otel conventions.

Thanks to all the people who have contributed