Would you be interested in instrumentation via environment variables?

[deejgregor]

I’ve been playing around with distributed tracing for Python command-line tools via a TRACEPARENT environment variable (inspired by https://github.com/equinix-labs/otel-cli), in particular:

1. An EnvironmentInstrumentor that extracts TRACEPARENT from os.environ. It also creates a span that is intended to encapsulate the entire program’s execution and is ended when the process exits.
2. A SubprocessInstrumentor that creates a span for executing the subprocess, injects TRACEPARENT environment variable for the called subprocess and ends the span when wait() is called on the subprocess.

I have this basically working and I wanted to check and see if this might be a useful contribution to opentelemetry-python-contrib.

[srikanthccv]

You probably want to look at #2110. If this open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#740 is accepted in spec we will get that PR merged and users can enable that propagator along with others.

[deejgregor]

Oh, excellent! Somehow my searches hadn't turned this up. Thanks for the links, @lonewolf3739.