@jessitronica/opentelemetry-web v0.13.3

Honeycomb OpenTelemetry Web

Honeycomb wrapper for OpenTelemetry in the browser. Detailed documentation for setup, instrumentation and troubleshooting can be found here.

STATUS: this library is in BETA. Data shapes are stable and safe for production. We are actively seeking feedback to ensure usability.

Latest release:

• built with OpenTelemetry JS Stable v1.30.0Experimental v0.57.0, API v1.9.0
• compatible with OpenTelemetry Auto-Instrumentations for Web ~0.45.0

This package sets up OpenTelemetry for tracing, using our recommended practices, including:

• Useful extra attributes, or fields, related to the browser
• Easy configuration to send to Honeycomb
• Basic sampler to control event volume
• Multi span attributes
• 'session.id' on every span, generated on page load
• Convenient packaging
• An informative debug mode
• Links to traces in Honeycomb
• Automatically enabled Web Vitals & error instrumentation

Why use this?

This wrapper is a little ahead of OpenTelemetry, so that you can get the recommended fields in before they're completely standardized.

This wrapper is at least as stable as OpenTelemetry, because it is backwards-compatible as we update it to the latest OpenTelemetry versions, semantic conventions, and recommended practices.

We test this library, with its combination of OpenTelemetry dependencies, so that you can be confident that upgrades will work.

This project provides a convenient distribution of all the code required to get traces from the browser.

Getting started

1. Install this library:

npm install @honeycombio/opentelemetry-web @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-web

2. Get a Honeycomb API key.

3. Initialize tracing at the start of your application:

import { HoneycombWebSDK, WebVitalsInstrumentation } from '@honeycombio/opentelemetry-web';
import { getWebAutoInstrumentations } from '@opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-web';

const sdk = new HoneycombWebSDK({
  apiKey: 'api-key-goes-here',
  serviceName: 'your-great-browser-application',
  instrumentations: [getWebAutoInstrumentations(), new WebVitalsInstrumentation()], // add automatic instrumentation
});
sdk.start();

4. Build and run your application, and then look for data in Honeycomb. On the Home screen, choose your application by looking for the service name in the Dataset dropdown at the top. Data should populate.

Refer to our Honeycomb documentation for more information on instrumentation and troubleshooting.

SDK Configuration

Pass these options to the HoneycombWebSDK:

* Note: the apiKey field is required because this SDK really wants to help you send data directly to Honeycomb.

WebVitalsInstrumentationConfig

GlobalErrorsInstrumentationConfig

recordException Helper Function

The recordException function is a utility to send exception spans with semantic attributes from anywhere in your JS app (e.g. a global app error function, React error boundary etc.)

Parameters

recordException(
  error: Error,
  attributes?: Attributes,
  tracer?: Tracer,
  applyCustomAttributesOnSpan?
): void

import { recordException } from '@honeycombio/opentelemetry-web';

try {
  // Some code that may throw an error
  throw new Error('Something went wrong!');
} catch (error) {
  recordException(error);
}

Send to an OpenTelemetry Collector

In production, we recommend running an OpenTelemetry Collector, so that your browser app can send traces to it for you to have control over your Honeycomb API key as well any data transformation. Your OpenTelemetry Collector can send the traces on to Honeycomb, and your API key will be in the Collector's configuration. Here is a configuration of the Honeycomb Web SDK that sends to your Collector:

{
  endpoint: "http(s)://<your-collector-url>",
  serviceName: "your-spiffy-browser-application",
  skipOptionsValidation: true // because we are not including apiKey
}

Context Management

OpenTelemetry uses the concept of a Context Manager to store propagate global span context through your system. OpenTelemetry provides a context manager for browser instrumentation based on the Zone.js library to track global context across asynchronous execution threads. This context manager can be plugged into this instrumentation like so:

import { ZoneContextManager } from '@opentelemetry/context-zone';

const sdk = new HoneycombWebSDK({
  // other config options omitted...
  contextManager: new ZoneContextManager()
});
sdk.start();

Zone.js has known limitations with async/await code, and requires your code to be transpiled down to ES2015. It also may carry a performance penalty.

For these reasons, we do not enable ZoneContextManager by default.

Auto-instrumentation

Here is a list of what gets instrumented automatically by including getWebAutoInstrumentations and WebVitalsInstrumentation in the list of instrumentations while initializing the SDK:

• Document & resource loading instrumentation
• Fetch request instrumentation
• XML HTTP request instrumentation
• User interaction instrumentation
• Web vitals instrumentation

Fields emitted

The SDK adds these fields to all telemetry:

Static fields are added to the Resource, so they are same for every span emitted for the loaded page.

Fields that can change during the lifetime of the page are instead added to each span in a SpanProcessor.

GlobalErrorsInstrumentationConfig

You can expect the following attributes to be emitted from the global errors instrumentation, unless you have it disabled in your SDK configuration: | name | status | static? | description | example | |----------------------------------------------|-----------------|----------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------|------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | exception.stacktrace | stable | per-span | The entire stacktrace as a string. | ReferenceError: VAR is not defined    at main(/index.js:37:18)    at (/index.js:68:6)    at (/index.js:68:6) | | exception.message | stable | per-span | The exception's message. | VAR is not defined | | exception.type | stable | per-span | The type of exception. | ReferenceError | | exception.structured_stacktrace.columns | custom | per-span | Array of columns extracted from exception.stacktrace. | 18, 6, 6 | | exception.structured_stacktrace.lines | custom | per-span | Array of lines extracted from exception.stacktrace. | 37, 68, 68 | | exception.structured_stacktrace.functions | custom | per-span | Array of function names extracted from exception.stacktrace. | main, \<anonymous>, \<anonymous> | | exception.structured_stacktrace.urls | custom | per-span | Array of urls or directories extracted from exception.stacktrace. | /index.js, /index.js, /index.js |

Migration Practices

This wrapper can change faster than OpenTelemetry, and yet be more stable. This section describes how we do that.

Versioning

Our version numbers are independent of the OpenTelemetry version numbers. Check the badge at the top of this README for the OpenTelemetry version this is based on.

When OpenTelemetry releases a new version of the packages this project depends on, we update this project to use them within a week, unless our tests indicate a problem.

When the OpenTelemetry API or SDK has a major version bump, this package will, too. We also have major version bumps of our own.

Code

If there is something we want to get into OpenTelemetry, or a PR that we wish were merged already, we can incorporate that code here in parallel to working to get it published upstream.

When that code is in place upstream, we remove it here, and release a new version. When there is no change to the inputs and outputs, nothing else is required.

Fields

This project adds fields to the outgoing spans. We follow semantic convention when they exist.

For fields that aren't yet part of the semantic conventions, we give them a name. If those field names become stable with a different name, then:

1. We add the new name, and emit both for 6 months.
2. We mark the old name as deprecated in this documentation
3. We offer a configuration option to NOT emit both.
4. After that period, we add a configuration parameter to allow you to say, keep emitting that old field name.
5. A year after the semantic convention has been in place, we stop emitting the old field name at all. (at the next major version bump)

Configuration

The configuration accepted by this wrapper is based on the options available in the OpenTelemetry libraries.

When an option is not available upstream, we give it a name. If that option becomes available upstream under a different name, we migrate to that.

1. We add the new name, and accept both for 6 months.
2. We mark the old name as deprecated in this documentation, and issue a warning in debug mode.
3. After this period, the old name will be ignored (at the next major version bump).

Change Log

See CHANGELOG.md