Instrument a Node application

Follow this article to install the upstream OpenTelemetry distribution for Node and auto-instrument your application for Grafana Cloud Application Observability.

Alternatively, if you need a instrumentation solution for Node supported by Grafana, use Grafana Beyla.

Before you begin

The is the first step to get telemetry data into Application Observability, you need:

A Node development environment with a package manager such as NPM or Yarn.
A Node application to instrument using a recent version of Node.

Install the SDK

Install OpenTelemetry SDK:

npm install --save @opentelemetry/api
npm install --save @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node

Instrument your application

Export the following environment variables before running your application to configure auto-instrumentation:

export OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER="otlp"
export OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER="otlp"
export NODE_OPTIONS="--require @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node/register"

# To setup your own Service Instance ID
export OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES="service.instance.id=my-service-instance-id"
export OTEL_NODE_RESOURCE_DETECTORS="env,host,os"

# To have a Service Instance ID generated using a random UUID
# Requires auto-instrumentations-node version 0.46.0+
export OTEL_NODE_RESOURCE_DETECTORS="env,host,os,serviceinstance"

Test your instrumentation

To test if you successfully instrumented your application and are producing telemetry data, run the application. The console output should print references to metrics and logs.