GitLab instrumentation for OpenTelemetry

Enable OpenTelemetry tracing, metrics, and logs in GDK development

note
Currently the default GDK environment is not set up by default to properly collect and display OpenTelemetry data. Therefore, you should point the OTEL_EXPORTER_*_ENDPOINT ENV vars to a GitLab project:
  1. Which has an Ultimate license, and where you have
  2. In which you have at least the Maintainer role
  3. In which you have access to enable top-level group feature flags (or is under the gitlab-org or gitlab-com top-level groups which already have the flags enabled)

Once you have a project identified to use:

  1. Note the ID of the project (from the three dots at upper right of main project page).
  2. Note the ID of the top-level group which contains the project.
  3. When setting the environment variables for the following steps, add them to env.runit in the root of the gitlab-development-kit folder.
  4. Follow instructions to configure distributed tracing for a project, with the following custom settings:

    • For the OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_ENDPOINT environment variable, use the following value: 

      export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_ENDPOINT="https://<gitlab-host>/v3/<gitlab-top-level-group-id>/<gitlab-project-id>/ingest/traces"
  5. Follow instructions to configure distributed metrics for a project, with the following custom settings:

    • For the OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_METRICS_ENDPOINT environment variable, use the following value: 

      export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_METRICS_ENDPOINT="https://<gitlab-host>/v3/<gitlab-top-level-group-id>/<gitlab-project-id>/ingest/metrics"
  6. Follow instructions to configure distributed logs for a project, with the following custom settings:

    • For the OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_LOGS_ENDPOINT environment variable, use the following value: 

      export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_LOGS_ENDPOINT="https://<gitlab-host>/v3/<gitlab-top-level-group-id>/<gitlab-project-id>/ingest/logs"

  7. Also add the following to the env.runit file: 

    # GitLab-specific flag to enable the Rails initializer to set up OpenTelemetry exporters
export GITLAB_ENABLE_OTEL_EXPORTERS=true
  8. gdk restart.
  9. Navigate to your project, and follow the instructions in the above docs to enable and view the tracing, metrics, or logs.

References