Overview

This project provides a tool to automatically instrument Go applications with OpenTelemetry at compile-time. It modifies the Go build process to inject OpenTelemetry code into the application without requiring manual changes to the source code.

Highlights:

• Zero Runtime Overhead¹ - Instrumentation is baked into your binary at compile time
• Zero Code Changes - Automatically instrument entire applications and dependencies
• Third-Party Library Support - Instrument libraries you don't control
• Complete Decoupling - Keep your codebase free from instrumentation concerns
• Flexible Deployment - Integrate at development time or in your CI/CD pipeline

Quick Start

1. Build the Tool

git clone https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go-compile-instrumentation.git
cd opentelemetry-go-compile-instrumentation
make build

The otelc binary will be built in the root directory.

2. Try the Demo

Just prefix the original go build command with otelc.

cd demo/app/basic
../../../otelc go build
./basic
[... output ...]

3. Run the Tests

make test

Community

Documentation

• Getting Started Guide - Setup and usage
• UX Design - Configuration options
• Implementation Details - Technical architecture
• API Design - API structure
• Semantic Conventions - Managing semantic conventions
• Instrumentation Guide - Add instrumentation hook for new libraries
• Instrumentation Rules - Rule types and YAML format reference
• Configuration and Fine-Tuning - Scope, filter, and tune instrumentation
• Troubleshooting - Diagnose why instrumentation was not applied
• External Configuration Sources - Declare instrumentations via otel.instrumentation.go
• Testing - Testing strategy, categories, and how to run tests

Video Talks

• Project Overview
• Deep Dive Details

Get Help

• GitHub Discussions - Ask questions
• GitHub Issues - Report bugs
• Slack Channel - Real-time chat
• Calendar - Community meetings (Thursdays, UTC: 09:30 – 10:30)

Contributing

We welcome contributions! See our contributing guide and development docs.

This project follows the OpenTelemetry Code of Conduct. Please also review our AI usage policy if you use AI tools in your workflow.

Here is a list of community roles with current and previous members:

Maintainers

• Azhar Momin, Independent
• Dario Castañe, Datadog
• Haibin Zhang, Alibaba
• Huxing Zhang, Alibaba
• Kemal Akkoyun, Datadog
• Przemyslaw Delewski, Quesma
• Xabier Martinez, Cabify
• Yi Yang, Alibaba

For more information about the maintainer role, see the community repository.

Approvers

For more information about the approver role, see the community repository.

Emeritus

• Dinesh Gurumurthy, Maintainer
• Eliott B, Approver
• Liu Ziming, Maintainer
• Romain Marcadier, Maintainer

For more information about the emeritus role, see the community repository.

Thanks to all of our contributors!

Footnotes

1. No additional overhead from the instrumentation tool itself, on top of the overhead incurred by the injected OpenTelemetry SDK code. ↩