AWS Lambda OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry instrumentation for AWS Lambda functions.

Installation

pip install aws-lambda-opentelemetry

Quick Start

from aws_lambda_opentelemetry import Instrumentor

instrumentor = Instrumentor(service="my-service")

@instrumentor.capture_lambda_handler
def handler(event, context):
    result = process(event)
    return {"statusCode": 200, "body": result}

@instrumentor.capture_method
def process(event):
    return event["body"].upper()

Features

• capture_lambda_handler — Wraps Lambda handlers with automatic span creation, AWS attribute extraction, and force flush
• capture_method — Wraps regular functions/methods as child spans
• Automatic attribute extraction — Detects API Gateway, HTTP API, ALB, SQS, SNS, S3, DynamoDB, Kinesis, EventBridge, and CloudWatch Logs events
• Cold start tracking — Automatically tracks cold start via faas.coldstart
• SQS trace exporter — Export spans to SQS with optional gzip/deflate compression

Supported Event Sources

Usage with Decorators

Lambda Handler

Both bare decorator and decorator-with-arguments styles are supported:

# Bare decorator
@instrumentor.capture_lambda_handler
def handler(event, context):
    ...

# With arguments
@instrumentor.capture_lambda_handler(name="my-handler")
def handler(event, context):
    ...

Methods and Functions

@instrumentor.capture_method
def my_function(x, y):
    return x + y

@instrumentor.capture_method(name="custom-span-name")
def another_function():
    ...

Child spans created by capture_method are automatically linked to the parent Lambda handler span.