open-telemetry/opentelemetry-python

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2603 stars · 981 forks observed · 2026-08-28

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

The official OpenTelemetry API and SDK for Python, providing vendor-neutral instrumentation for distributed traces, metrics, and logs. It lets developers instrument Python applications once and export telemetry to any observability backend such as Jaeger, Prometheus, or commercial vendors.

Use cases

• add distributed tracing to a python microservices app
• instrument python code to export metrics to prometheus
• correlate logs and traces across services in python
• send opentelemetry traces from a flask or django app to jaeger
• avoid vendor lock-in when collecting application telemetry
• set up observability for a python application without changing backends

When to choose

• you need vendor-neutral traces, metrics, or logs in a Python application
• you want to switch observability backends without rewriting instrumentation
• you are building microservices and need cross-service context propagation
• you want the industry-standard OTel API with stable trace and metric support

When to avoid

• you need a full observability backend with storage and visualization - OpenTelemetry only generates and exports data
• you rely heavily on the logs signal, which is still in development with possible breaking changes
• you need a zero-dependency, batteries-included APM solution rather than an instrumentation SDK

Facets

library · maturity stable

tracing monitoring logging sdk monitoring microservices developer-tools python cross-platform opentelemetry observability distributed-tracing metrics telemetry vendor-neutral apm devops

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