Skip to content

Reference

Lookup material: exact names, exact defaults, and what happens when a value is wrong. Nothing here teaches a workflow. The how-to guides do that, and the explanation pages say why the design is shaped this way.

What is on each reference page

  • Configuration keys: the telemetry.* key tree this module names, every field on Config, SignalConfig, SignalOverrides and Settings, the default each takes, and how a wrong value fails.
  • Provider options and defaults: the three NewProvider signatures, WithSampling and WithInterval, and the batching, timeout and retry defaults that come from the OpenTelemetry SDK underneath.
  • Environment variables: every OTEL_* variable that changes this module's behaviour, and, just as important, the four that look like they should and do not.
  • Errors: every rejection ParseEndpoint can produce, the ErrInvalidEndpoint sentinel, and the exporter-construction failures the provider factories wrap.

Where the Go API reference lives

Type signatures, method sets and doc comments are published on pkg.go.dev and are generated from the source, so they cannot drift. The pages here cover what godoc cannot: defaults that live in the SDK rather than in this module's signatures, the configuration key names, and the environment contract that spans both.

Version these pages describe

The SDK defaults on these pages were last checked on 2026-10-12 against the versions pinned in go.mod that day: go.opentelemetry.io/otel, otel/sdk, sdk/metric, sdk/log and the trace and metric OTLP/HTTP exporters at v1.47.0, the log exporter at v0.23.0, and contrib/bridges/otelslog at v0.21.0. Defaults that belong to the SDK rather than to this module are marked as such, because an OTel bump can move them. See OTel version lockstep for why those pins move together.