Summary
Instrumentation libraries for third-party libraries are an excellent way for users to use OpenTelemetry with little to no effort. Additionally, instrumentation libraries don't require users to wait for third-party libraries to support OpenTelemetry directly. This helps reduce the burden on the maintainers of those third-party libraries by not asking them to support APIs, which are still evolving.
This chapter allowed us to understand how auto-instrumentation leverages instrumentation libraries to simplify the user experience of adopting OpenTelemetry. By inspecting all the components that combine to make it possible to simplify the code needed to configure telemetry pipelines, we were able to produce telemetry with little to no instrumentation code.
Revisiting the grocery store then allowed us to compare the telemetry generated by auto-instrumented code with manual instrumentation. Along the way, we took a closer look at how different instrumentations are implemented...