KubeCon Observability Day NA 2024 Talk: Where’s the Auto in Auto-Instrumentation? A Look at Current Automation Strategies with OTel

Joshua Lee was invited to talk about Automatic Instrumentation at CNCF-Hosted Co-Located.

“Automatic Instrumentation” can mean a lot of things depending on context. Whether we’re discussing the Instrumentation SDKs or full-kernel observability with eBPF, the promise is the same: end-to-end observability coverage with no custom code and minimal setup. 

First, I will review how the different mechanisms available for automatic instrumentation work within each of the 11 languages supported by OpenTelemetry. I’ll examine: 

• how code-path instrumentation works at the library level by diving into the Node.js OpenTelemetry Extension and the JavaScript libraries it supports 
• automatic instrumentation via attachment with Java and Python 
• automatic instrumentation injection using the OTel Operator for DotNet, Java, and NodeJS 

Finally, I’ll take a peek at the future of automatic instrumentation of compiled binaries with a look at the Go instrumentation library built using eBPF. 

In this talk will attempt to clarify the different mechanisms that are often colloquially lumped under the term “Auto-Instrumentation” and help to clarify for end users exactly what is possible within each supported language. I will answer questions that I often hear about instrumentation such as “will I need to modify my application code?”, “Will it work without Kubernetes?”, “Will I be able to use the libraries I’m currently using?”, and “How can I use this in a completely custom code base?