OpenTelemetry SiteCustomize Instrumentation

Automatic OpenTelemetry instrumentation via Python's sitecustomize mechanism. Designed for environments where modifying the application startup command is difficult or impossible: managed runtimes, serverless platforms, job schedulers, and similar constrained settings. Install the package and instrumentation is applied automatically at Python startup, no wrapper command required.

When to Use This

The opentelemetry-instrument CLI is the standard way to auto-instrument a Python application. This package is for situations where wrapping your command with the CLI is not feasible, or requires tedious workarounds.

Note: If you control your application's startup command, prefer the opentelemetry-instrument CLI. This package is specifically designed for cases where that is not practical.

Installation

pip install opentelemetry-sitecustomize

or

uv add opentelemetry-sitecustomize

You will also need to install the OpenTelemetry instrumentors for the libraries you use. For example:

pip install opentelemetry-instrumentation-flask opentelemetry-instrumentation-requests

Usage

With the package installed, simply run your application as usual:

python app.py

No need for:

opentelemetry-instrument python app.py

OpenTelemetry instrumentation is applied automatically at Python startup.

Configuration

This package uses the same initialization path as the opentelemetry-instrument CLI, so all standard OpenTelemetry environment variables apply:

• OTEL_SERVICE_NAME - set the service name for your traces
• OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER - choose the trace exporter (e.g., otlp, console, none)
• OTEL_METRICS_EXPORTER - choose the metrics exporter
• OTEL_LOGS_EXPORTER - choose the logs exporter
• OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT - set the OTLP collector endpoint
• OTEL_PYTHON_DISABLED_INSTRUMENTATIONS - comma-separated list of instrumentations to skip

See the OpenTelemetry Python documentation for the full list of supported environment variables.

How It Works

This package registers a sitecustomize entrypoint that calls opentelemetry.instrumentation.auto_instrumentation:initialize during Python's site initialization. This is the same initialization function used by the opentelemetry-instrument CLI, but triggered automatically via the sitecustomize-entrypoints library.

Requirements

• Python >= 3.9
• sitecustomize-entrypoints ~= 1.0
• opentelemetry-api >= 1.25
• opentelemetry-instrumentation >= 0.46b0

License

Apache-2.0