Chapter 7: Instrumentation Libraries

Understanding the ins and outs of the OpenTelemetry API is quite helpful for manually instrumenting code. But what if we could save ourselves some of that work and still have visibility into what our code is doing? As covered in Chapter 3, Auto-Instrumentation, one of the initial objectives of OpenTelemetry is providing developers with tools to instrument their applications at a minimal cost. Instrumentation libraries combined with auto-instrumentation enable users to start with OpenTelemetry without learning the APIs, and leverage the community's efforts and expertise.

This chapter will investigate the components of auto-instrumentation, how they can be configured, and how they interact with instrumentation libraries. Diving deeper into the implementation details of instrumentation libraries will allow us to understand precisely how telemetry data is produced. Although telemetry created automatically may seem like magic, we'll seek...