observability¶

OpenTelemetry providers for Go services. Build OTLP providers for logs, metrics and traces from one typed config, with validated endpoints and a fallback to the standard OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_* environment variables.

go get gitlab.com/phpboyscout/go/observability

gitlab.com/phpboyscout/go/observability sets up OpenTelemetry export for a service without bringing a framework along. Resolve a typed Settings once, then hand it to the logs, metrics and tracing provider factories. It is the observability layer extracted from go-tool-base.

Why¶

• Framework-free, OTel-native. It carries the OpenTelemetry SDK, because that is its job. Apart from the OpenTelemetry modules, the only module it imports is go/errors, and a depfootprint_test.go guard forbids go-tool-base, Viper, Cobra, pflag, Charm and the AWS, GCP and Azure SDKs.
• Typed values in, providers out. otelcore works from a typed Settings; you own how those are sourced. ResolveSettings merges a shared config with per-signal overrides, so one endpoint serves all three signals with targeted exceptions.
• Independent signal packages. logs, metrics and tracing each build their own exporter, so a service that only traces never links the log or metric exporters.
• Env fallback. An empty Endpoint is intentional, not an error: the SDK then reads the standard OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_* variables. See the config model.

What it does not do¶

Worth reading before you go looking for something that is not here. It builds OTLP/HTTP exporters only: no gRPC, no Prometheus, no stdout. It produces no telemetry of its own, so there is no HTTP, gRPC, runtime or database instrumentation. It registers nothing globally, and it does not honour Settings.Enabled, OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLER or OTEL_METRIC_EXPORT_INTERVAL.

The full list, with the reasoning, is on What this module does not do.

Where next¶

Part of the phpboyscout Go toolkit, a set of small, framework-free Go modules extracted from go-tool-base.

Further reading¶

The blog collects its posts on this subject under the Observability tag. For a guided start, Add OpenTelemetry traces, metrics and logs to a Go service wires these providers into a running service, as part of the Building a web service in Go route.