natsio-otel

OpenTelemetry adapter over natsio's zero-dependency instrumentation seam. Exports metrics for a natsio connection, plus trace-context propagation helpers for message headers. Distribution natsio-otel, imported as natsio.otel. Pre-1.0, no API-stability promises.

import natsio
from natsio.otel import OtelInstrumentation

nc = await natsio.connect(
    "nats://localhost",
    instrumentation=OtelInstrumentation(),  # meter_provider=None -> global
)

OtelInstrumentation(meter_provider=None, *, record_subject=False) implements the core Instrumentation protocol. It records into the given meter provider (or the global one). Every hook is allocation-light and cannot raise.

Metrics

Instrument names follow the OpenTelemetry messaging semantic conventions where the spec covers the concept; everything else is namespaced nats.client.* and marked custom below. All instruments carry messaging.system=nats.

Semantic-convention attribute keys (messaging.system, messaging.destination.name, messaging.operation.type, error.type) are hardcoded strings rather than imported from opentelemetry-semantic-conventions, which is not a runtime dependency.

Subject cardinality (record_subject)

The message subject maps to messaging.destination.name, but NATS subjects — especially _INBOX.* reply subjects generated per request — are effectively unbounded and will explode a metric backend's cardinality. So subjects are not recorded by default. Pass record_subject=True only when your subject space is known to be small and static:

OtelInstrumentation(record_subject=True)

This adds one dict allocation per message on the hot path (the default reuses a shared attribute dict and allocates nothing per message).

Trace-context propagation

from natsio.otel import inject, extract

• inject(headers=None, *, context=None) -> Headers — returns a fresh natsio.Headers (the caller's mapping is never mutated) with traceparent / tracestate (and any other configured propagators) written in, ready to pass to publish.
• extract(source, *, context=None) -> Context — pulls a trace Context out of a received Msg (or a Headers/mapping, or None).

from opentelemetry import trace
from opentelemetry.trace import SpanKind

tracer = trace.get_tracer("myapp")

# producer
with tracer.start_as_current_span("send order", kind=SpanKind.PRODUCER):
    await nc.publish("orders", body, headers=inject())

# consumer
async def handler(msg):
    ctx = extract(msg)
    with tracer.start_as_current_span("process order", context=ctx, kind=SpanKind.CONSUMER):
        ...

The spans story (honest version)

This extension ships metrics, not automatic spans. That is a limitation of the instrumentation seam as it stands, not a design choice, and the propagation helpers above are the clean subset that is expressible.

The seam is a set of fire-and-forget point-event hooks (on_message_published(subject, size) -> None, etc.). Real producer/consumer spans need three things the hooks cannot provide:

1. A place to inject context into an outgoing publish. on_message_published fires after the frame is already encoded and buffered, and receives only (subject, size) — never the headers, which it also could not mutate. There is no publish-wrapping seam, so a traceparent cannot be attached automatically. Header injection must be done by the caller via inject().
2. A scope around message processing. on_message_delivered fires at parse time, before dispatch and before the user callback runs, and carries only (subject, size) — no headers, no reply. It cannot bracket the handler, so a consumer/process span cannot be started as the handler's parent, nor its duration measured. Extraction must be done by the caller via extract().
3. Operation timing. The semconv histograms messaging.client.operation.duration and messaging.process.duration need paired start/stop (or an elapsed argument). The hooks are instantaneous and unpaired, so these two core metrics are not implemented here.

See CHANGELOG.md and the task's friction report for concrete proposals to the core (header-carrying delivery hook, publish start/complete pair, a handler-wrapping seam).

Requirements

• natsio, opentelemetry-api>=1.20
• Tests additionally use opentelemetry-sdk and a nats-server binary.

Part of the natsio extension tier. If adopted into orbit.py the move is mechanical (natsio/otel/ -> orbit/otel/).