Manual Instrumentation Best Practices
Understand when and how to apply manual instrumentation for fine-grained control over your observability data. Learn to enrich traces with custom attributes.
Manual Instrumentation Intro
Welcome! In this lesson, we'll dive into manual instrumentation with OpenTelemetry. While auto-instrumentation is great for quick wins, manual control gives you precision.
Manual instrumentation allows you to record highly specific details about your application's internal operations. This is crucial for debugging complex business logic or custom components.
Why Manual Over Auto?
Auto-instrumentation automatically collects data from common libraries and frameworks. However, it can't know your unique application logic.
- Custom Logic: Instrument specific functions or blocks of code.
- Business Context: Add attributes relevant to your business domain.
- Fine-Grained Control: Define exact span boundaries and relationships.
- Missing Coverage: Cover areas where auto-instrumentation doesn't reach.
All lessons in this course
- Auto-Instrumentation Techniques
- Manual Instrumentation Best Practices
- Context Propagation and Baggage
- Span Attributes, Events, and Status