Instrument a Go application
Grafana Cloud

Instrument a Go application

For most use cases Grafana Labs recommends Beyla, eBPF network-level auto-instrumentation, which is easy to set up and supports all languages and frameworks.

If you need process-level telemetry for Go, follow this documentation to set up the upstream OpenTelemetry SDK for Go for Application Observability.

Install the SDK

Before you begin ensure you have a Go 1.22+ development environment a Go application to instrument.

Run the following command in the project folder:

sh
go get "go.opentelemetry.io/contrib/instrumentation/net/http/otelhttp" \
  "go.opentelemetry.io/contrib/instrumentation/runtime" \
  "go.opentelemetry.io/otel" \
  "go.opentelemetry.io/otel/exporters/otlp/otlpmetric/otlpmetrichttp" \
  "go.opentelemetry.io/otel/exporters/otlp/otlptrace" \
  "go.opentelemetry.io/otel/exporters/otlp/otlptrace/otlptracehttp" \
  "go.opentelemetry.io/otel/sdk" \
  "go.opentelemetry.io/otel/sdk/metric"

Instrument your application

Create an otel.go file with the following bootstrap code to initialize the SDK to export telemetry:

Go
package main

import (
	"context"
	"errors"
	"go.opentelemetry.io/contrib/instrumentation/runtime"
	"go.opentelemetry.io/otel"
	"go.opentelemetry.io/otel/exporters/otlp/otlpmetric/otlpmetrichttp"
	"go.opentelemetry.io/otel/exporters/otlp/otlptrace"
	"go.opentelemetry.io/otel/exporters/otlp/otlptrace/otlptracehttp"
	"go.opentelemetry.io/otel/propagation"
	"go.opentelemetry.io/otel/sdk/metric"
	"go.opentelemetry.io/otel/sdk/trace"
	"log"
	"time"
)

// setupOTelSDK bootstraps the OpenTelemetry pipeline.
// If it does not return an error, make sure to call shutdown for proper cleanup.
func setupOTelSDK(ctx context.Context) (shutdown func(context.Context) error, err error) {
	var shutdownFuncs []func(context.Context) error

	// shutdown calls cleanup functions registered via shutdownFuncs.
	// The errors from the calls are joined.
	// Each registered cleanup will be invoked once.
	shutdown = func(ctx context.Context) error {
		var err error
		for _, fn := range shutdownFuncs {
			err = errors.Join(err, fn(ctx))
		}
		shutdownFuncs = nil
		return err
	}

	// handleErr calls shutdown for cleanup and makes sure that all errors are returned.
	handleErr := func(inErr error) {
		err = errors.Join(inErr, shutdown(ctx))
	}

	prop := propagation.NewCompositeTextMapPropagator(
		propagation.TraceContext{},
		propagation.Baggage{},
	)
	otel.SetTextMapPropagator(prop)

	traceExporter, err := otlptrace.New(ctx, otlptracehttp.NewClient())
	if err != nil {
		return nil, err
	}

	tracerProvider := trace.NewTracerProvider(trace.WithBatcher(traceExporter))
	if err != nil {
		handleErr(err)
		return
	}
	shutdownFuncs = append(shutdownFuncs, tracerProvider.Shutdown)
	otel.SetTracerProvider(tracerProvider)

	metricExporter, err := otlpmetrichttp.New(ctx)
	if err != nil {
		return nil, err
	}

	meterProvider := metric.NewMeterProvider(metric.WithReader(metric.NewPeriodicReader(metricExporter)))
	if err != nil {
		handleErr(err)
		return
	}
	shutdownFuncs = append(shutdownFuncs, meterProvider.Shutdown)
	otel.SetMeterProvider(meterProvider)

	err = runtime.Start(runtime.WithMinimumReadMemStatsInterval(time.Second))
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatal(err)
	}

	return
}

Edit your main.go to set up the SDK and instrument the HTTP server using the go.opentelemetry.io/contrib/instrumentation/net/http/otelhttp instrumentation library:

Go
package main

import (
	"context"
	"errors"
	"log"
	"net"
	"net/http"
	"os"
	"os/signal"
	"time"

	"go.opentelemetry.io/contrib/instrumentation/net/http/otelhttp"
)

func main() {
	if err := run(); err != nil {
		log.Fatalln(err)
	}
}

func run() (err error) {
	// Handle SIGINT (CTRL+C) gracefully.
	ctx, stop := signal.NotifyContext(context.Background(), os.Interrupt)
	defer stop()

	// Set up OpenTelemetry.
	otelShutdown, err := setupOTelSDK(ctx)
	if err != nil {
		return
	}
	// Handle shutdown properly so nothing leaks.
	defer func() {
		err = errors.Join(err, otelShutdown(context.Background()))
	}()

	// Start HTTP server.
	srv := &http.Server{
		Addr:         ":8080",
		BaseContext:  func(_ net.Listener) context.Context { return ctx },
		ReadTimeout:  time.Second,
		WriteTimeout: 10 * time.Second,
		Handler:      newHTTPHandler(),
	}
	srvErr := make(chan error, 1)
	go func() {
		srvErr <- srv.ListenAndServe()
	}()

	// Wait for interruption.
	select {
	case err = <-srvErr:
		// Error when starting HTTP server.
		return
	case <-ctx.Done():
		// Wait for first CTRL+C.
		// Stop receiving signal notifications as soon as possible.
		stop()
	}

	// When Shutdown is called, ListenAndServe immediately returns ErrServerClosed.
	err = srv.Shutdown(context.Background())
	return
}

func newHTTPHandler() http.Handler {
	mux := http.NewServeMux()

	// handleFunc is a replacement for mux.HandleFunc
	// which enriches the handler's HTTP instrumentation with the pattern as the http.route.
	handleFunc := func(pattern string, handlerFunc func(http.ResponseWriter, *http.Request)) {
		// Configure the "http.route" for the HTTP instrumentation.
		handler := otelhttp.WithRouteTag(pattern, http.HandlerFunc(handlerFunc))
		mux.Handle(pattern, handler)
	}

	// Register handlers.
	handleFunc("/rolldice", rolldice)

	// Add HTTP instrumentation for the whole server.
	handler := otelhttp.NewHandler(mux, "/")
	return handler
}

Test your instrumentation

To test if you’ve successfully instrumented your application, run your application, generate some traffic, and you should see metrics and logs outputted to the console.

sh
# use http instead of https
# needed because of https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go/issues/4834
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_INSECURE=“true”

go run .

Example application

See the Rolldice service for a complete example setup.

Next steps

  1. Create a free Grafana Cloud account.
  2. For a local development and testing, send data to the Grafana Cloud OTLP endpoint.
  3. For production, set up an OpenTelemetry Collector.
  4. Observe your services in Application Observability.

Resources

  1. Go OpenTelemetry documentation
  2. otelhttp Go package
  3. opentelemetry-go-contrib on GitHub