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This guide will help you instrument your Python application(s) with OpenTelemetry and send traces to Checkly.

Step 1: Install the OpenTelemetry SDK

Install the relevant OpenTelemetry packages:

pip install opentelemetry-distro \
    opentelemetry-exporter-otlp

Step 2: Initialize the instrumentation

Use the opentelemetry-bootstrap command to automatically install any OTel libraries based on your current Python app.

opentelemetry-bootstrap --action=install

Step 3: Start your app with the instrumentation

Grab your OTel API key in the Send traces section of the Open Telemetry Integration page in the Checkly app.
Now, export your API key in your shell by setting the OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS environment variable.

export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS="authorization=Bearer%20<your-api-key>"

Note that the Python OTel library demands that header key/value pairs are URL encoded. This is why we use %20 instead of a space.

Next, export the endpoint for the region you want to use, give your service a name and set the protocol to http/protobuf

export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT="https://otel.eu-west-1.checklyhq.com"
# export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT="https://otel.us-east-1.checklyhq.com"
export OTEL_SERVICE_NAME="your-service-name"
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL=http/protobuf

We are using the standard OpenTelemetry environment variables here to configure the OTLP exporter.

Variable	Description
`OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS`	The `Authorization` HTTP header containing your Checkly OTel API key as a `Bearer` token.
`OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT`	The Checkly OTel API endpoint for the region you want to use.
`OTEL_SERVICE_NAME`	The name of your service to identify it among the spans in the web UI.
`OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL`	Sets the protocol to use, which is gRPC by default in Python. Checkly only supports HTTP

Then start your app with the extra opentelemetry-instrument command before the regular start command.

opentelemetry-instrument python myapp.py

🎉 You are done. Any interactions with your app that are triggered by a Checkly synthetic monitoring check will now generate traces, which are sent back to Checkly and displayed in the Checkly UI.

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Last updated on April 30, 2024. You can contribute to this documentation by editing this page on Github