Adding Automatic Instrumentation to Your App, Made Easy with the OpenTelemetry Injector
As OpenTelemetry adoption grows across infrastructure and application layers, easing the operational burden of instrumentation remains a shared priority. Today, we’re excited to highlight a recent donation from Splunk to the OpenTelemetry community: a host-based mechanism to automatically inject OpenTelemetry Automatic Instrumentation into your app on any Linux host.
This component has reached production stability and is now being donated to the community as the OpenTelemetry Injector. It helps streamline OpenTelemetry deployment across languages and systems.
What it does
The OpenTelemetry Injector intercepts process invocation on hosts and adds environment variables to set up OpenTelemetry Automatic Instrumentation for the language used by the program, such as Java, Node.js, .NET, or Python.
It supports two methods for this injection:
- systemd environment variable configuration
/etc/preload.sohook that scans process invocations, intercepts them, and adds environment variables
Why Splunk is donating it
This component has reached production-grade stability, and Splunk is donating it to:
- Share maintenance responsibilities with the community
- Align more closely with OpenTelemetry’s long-term direction
- Encourage broader collaboration and input from the ecosystem
Where to find it
You can explore the code in the
opentelemetry-injector
repository. It includes the full implementation of the Linux injection mechanism
and provides a foundation for ongoing contribution.
What’s next
Together with contributors from dash0 and Omlet Stack, the team will continue supporting and maintaining the code in the near term. More importantly, we’re actively looking for additional collaborators and maintainers from the OpenTelemetry community to shape the roadmap together.
If you’re interested in improving auto-instrumentation workflows on Linux, this is a great opportunity to get involved.
Get involved
Want to learn more or contribute?
- 💬 Join the conversation in the
#otel-injectorchannel on the OpenTelemetry Slack. - 🔗 Check out the opentelemetry-injector repository.