What is auto-instrumentation?

In the very early days of the OpenTelemetry project, a proposal was created to support producing telemetry without manual instrumentation. As we mentioned earlier in this book, OpenTelemetry uses OpenTelemetry Enhancement Proposals or OTEPs to propose significant changes or new work before producing a specification. One of the very first OTEPs to be produced by the project (https://github.com/open-telemetry/oteps/blob/main/text/0001-telemetry-without-manual-instrumentation.md) described the need to support users that wanted to produce telemetry without having to modify the code to do so:

Cross-language requirements for automated approaches to extracting portable telemetry data with zero source code modification. – OpenTelemetry Enhancement Proposal #0001

Being able to get started with OpenTelemetry with very little effort for new users was very much a goal from the start of the project. The hope was to address one of the pain points of producing...