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Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry Node.js

Elastic Stack Serverless Observability

The Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry (EDOT) Node.js is a light wrapper around the upstream OpenTelemetry SDK for Node.js, configured for the best experience with Elastic Observability.

Use EDOT Node.js to start the OpenTelemetry SDK with your Node.js application, and automatically capture tracing data, performance metrics, and logs. Traces, metrics, and logs can be sent to any OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) Collector you choose.

A goal of this distribution is to avoid introducing proprietary concepts in addition to those defined by the wider OpenTelemetry community. For any additional features introduced, Elastic aims at contributing them back to the upstream OpenTelemetry project.

In addition to all the features of OpenTelemetry Node.js, with EDOT Node.js you have access to the following:

  • A single package that includes several OpenTelemetry packages as dependencies, so you only need to install and update a single package (for most use cases). This is similar to OpenTelemetry's @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node package.
  • The @elastic/opentelemetry-instrumentation-openai instrumentation for monitoring usage of the OpenAI Node.js client library.
  • Improvements and bug fixes contributed by the Elastic team before the changes are available upstream in OpenTelemetry repositories.
  • Optional features that can enhance OpenTelemetry data that is being sent to Elastic.
  • Elastic-specific processors that ensure optimal compatibility when exporting OpenTelemetry signal data to an Elastic backend like an Elastic Observability deployment.
  • Pre-configured collection of tracing and metrics signals, applying some opinionated defaults, such as which sources are collected by default. Additional metrics are collected by default: process.cpu.* and process.memory.* metrics from the host-metrics package.

Use EDOT Node.js with your Node.js application to automatically capture distributed tracing data, performance metrics, and logs. EDOT Node.js automatically instruments popular modules used by your service.

Follow the step-by-step instructions in Setup to get started.