open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go-instrumentation

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1030 stars · 145 forks observed · 2026-09-01

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

OpenTelemetry automatic instrumentation for Go applications that uses eBPF to inject tracing without modifying source code. It captures distributed traces from popular Go libraries and exports them to any OpenTelemetry-compatible backend.

Use cases

• add distributed tracing to Go services without code changes
• instrument Go microservices with zero-code observability
• trace HTTP and gRPC calls in Go apps via eBPF
• get OpenTelemetry spans from existing Go binaries
• observe Go applications on Kubernetes without recompiling

When to choose

• you need tracing for Go apps but cannot modify their source code
• you want vendor-neutral OpenTelemetry traces with minimal setup
• you run Go services on Linux (kernel 4.4+) and can use eBPF

When to avoid

• you need metrics or logs auto-instrumentation, as this project focuses on tracing
• you run on non-Linux platforms without Docker or a VM
• you need guaranteed arm64 support, since it is untested there
• you require fully stable, production-hardened tooling, as the project is still work in progress

Facets

library · maturity active

tracing monitoring monitoring developer-tools go ebpf opentelemetry auto-instrumentation zero-code-instrumentation distributed-tracing telemetry instrumentation devops linux docker kubernetes

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go-instrumentation")