splunk-opentelemetry

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Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Python

The Splunk distribution of OpenTelemetry Python provides multiple installable packages that automatically instrument your Python application to capture and report distributed traces to Splunk APM. Instrumentation works by patching supported libraries at runtime with an OpenTelemetry-compatible tracer to capture and export trace spans.

This distribution comes with the following defaults:

• OTLP gRPC exporter configured to send spans to a locally running Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector (http://localhost:4317).
• Unlimited default limits for configuration options to support full-fidelity traces.
• Inclusion of system metrics

Requirements

This Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry requires Python 3.10 or later. Supported libraries are listed here.

Get started

For complete instructions on how to get started with the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Python, see Instrument a Python application for Splunk Observability Cloud in the official documentation.

For the standard OpenTelemetry setup, install the Splunk distribution in your application environment. The distribution configures OTLP exporters for traces, metrics, and logs, includes system metrics instrumentation, and enables Python logging instrumentation.

pip install splunk-opentelemetry

Install instrumentation packages for the libraries your application uses:

opentelemetry-bootstrap -a install

Then run your application with opentelemetry-instrument:

OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=my-python-service opentelemetry-instrument python app.py

By default, OTLP exporters send telemetry to a locally running Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector at http://localhost:4317. To send telemetry directly to Splunk Observability Cloud instead, set SPLUNK_REALM and SPLUNK_ACCESS_TOKEN before starting your application. SPLUNK_REALM configures direct ingest endpoints for traces and metrics.

Optional: Cisco SecureApp

To also install the Cisco SecureApp OpenTelemetry extension, specify the secureapp extra:

pip install "splunk-opentelemetry[secureapp]"

This extra installs the SecureApp Python agent, which reports runtime Python package dependencies through OpenTelemetry logs.

SecureApp dependency logs use the secureapp instrumentation scope. Collector deployments must route those logs to the SecureApp event ingest endpoint (/v3/event) and add the SecureApp instrumentation header on the outbound exporter. See docs/secureapp.md for setup details and docs/examples/secureapp-collector-config.yaml for a collector example.

License

The Splunk distribution of OpenTelemetry Python Instrumentation is a distribution of OpenTelemetry Python. It is licensed under the terms of the Apache Software License version 2.0. See the license file for more details.

Deprecation

ℹ️ The Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Python version 1.X is deprecated as of February 28, 2025 and will reach end of support on February 28, 2026. Existing customers should consider migrating to Splunk OpenTelemetry Python 2.0 or higher. See Migrate to the Splunk Python 2.0 instrumentation.