OpenTelemetry requests Instrumentation

This library allows tracing HTTP requests made by the requests library.

Usage

import requests
from opentelemetry.instrumentation.requests import RequestsInstrumentor

# You can optionally pass a custom TracerProvider to instrument().
RequestsInstrumentor().instrument()
response = requests.get(url="https://www.example.org/")

Configuration

Request/Response hooks

The requests instrumentation supports extending tracing behavior with the help of request and response hooks. These are functions that are called back by the instrumentation right after a Span is created for a request and right before the span is finished processing a response respectively. The hooks can be configured as follows:

import requests
from opentelemetry.instrumentation.requests import RequestsInstrumentor

# `request_obj` is an instance of requests.PreparedRequest
def request_hook(span, request_obj):
    pass

# `request_obj` is an instance of requests.PreparedRequest
# `response` is an instance of requests.Response
def response_hook(span, request_obj, response):
    pass

RequestsInstrumentor().instrument(
    request_hook=request_hook, response_hook=response_hook
)

Capture HTTP request and response headers

You can configure the agent to capture specified HTTP headers as span attributes, according to the semantic conventions.

Request headers

To capture HTTP request headers as span attributes, set the environment variable OTEL_INSTRUMENTATION_HTTP_CAPTURE_HEADERS_CLIENT_REQUEST to a comma delimited list of HTTP header names.

For example using the environment variable,

export OTEL_INSTRUMENTATION_HTTP_CAPTURE_HEADERS_CLIENT_REQUEST="content-type,custom_request_header"

will extract content-type and custom_request_header from the request headers and add them as span attributes.

Request header names in Requests are case-insensitive. So, giving the header name as CUStom-Header in the environment variable will capture the header named custom-header.

Regular expressions may also be used to match multiple headers that correspond to the given pattern. For example:

export OTEL_INSTRUMENTATION_HTTP_CAPTURE_HEADERS_CLIENT_REQUEST="Accept.*,X-.*"

Would match all request headers that start with Accept and X-.

To capture all request headers, set OTEL_INSTRUMENTATION_HTTP_CAPTURE_HEADERS_CLIENT_REQUEST to ".*".

export OTEL_INSTRUMENTATION_HTTP_CAPTURE_HEADERS_CLIENT_REQUEST=".*"

The name of the added span attribute will follow the format http.request.header.<header_name> where <header_name> is the normalized HTTP header name (lowercase, with - replaced by _). The value of the attribute will be a single item list containing all the header values.

For example: http.request.header.custom_request_header = ["<value1>", "<value2>"]

Response headers

To capture HTTP response headers as span attributes, set the environment variable OTEL_INSTRUMENTATION_HTTP_CAPTURE_HEADERS_CLIENT_RESPONSE to a comma delimited list of HTTP header names.

For example using the environment variable,

export OTEL_INSTRUMENTATION_HTTP_CAPTURE_HEADERS_CLIENT_RESPONSE="content-type,custom_response_header"

will extract content-type and custom_response_header from the response headers and add them as span attributes.

Response header names in Requests are case-insensitive. So, giving the header name as CUStom-Header in the environment variable will capture the header named custom-header.

Regular expressions may also be used to match multiple headers that correspond to the given pattern. For example:

export OTEL_INSTRUMENTATION_HTTP_CAPTURE_HEADERS_CLIENT_RESPONSE="Content.*,X-.*"

Would match all response headers that start with Content and X-.

To capture all response headers, set OTEL_INSTRUMENTATION_HTTP_CAPTURE_HEADERS_CLIENT_RESPONSE to ".*".

export OTEL_INSTRUMENTATION_HTTP_CAPTURE_HEADERS_CLIENT_RESPONSE=".*"

The name of the added span attribute will follow the format http.response.header.<header_name> where <header_name> is the normalized HTTP header name (lowercase, with - replaced by _). The value of the attribute will be a list containing the header values.

For example: http.response.header.custom_response_header = ["<value1>", "<value2>"]

Sanitizing headers

In order to prevent storing sensitive data such as personally identifiable information (PII), session keys, passwords, etc, set the environment variable OTEL_INSTRUMENTATION_HTTP_CAPTURE_HEADERS_SANITIZE_FIELDS to a comma delimited list of HTTP header names to be sanitized.

Regexes may be used, and all header names will be matched in a case-insensitive manner.

For example using the environment variable,

export OTEL_INSTRUMENTATION_HTTP_CAPTURE_HEADERS_SANITIZE_FIELDS=".*session.*,set-cookie"

will replace the value of headers such as session-id and set-cookie with [REDACTED] in the span.

Note

The environment variable names used to capture HTTP headers are still experimental, and thus are subject to change.

Custom Duration Histogram Boundaries

To customize the duration histogram bucket boundaries used for HTTP client request duration metrics, you can provide a list of values when instrumenting:

import requests
from opentelemetry.instrumentation.requests import RequestsInstrumentor

custom_boundaries = [0.0, 5.0, 10.0, 25.0, 50.0, 100.0]

RequestsInstrumentor().instrument(
    duration_histogram_boundaries=custom_boundaries
)

Exclude lists

To exclude certain URLs from being tracked, set the environment variable OTEL_PYTHON_REQUESTS_EXCLUDED_URLS (or OTEL_PYTHON_EXCLUDED_URLS as fallback) with comma delimited regexes representing which URLs to exclude.

For example,

export OTEL_PYTHON_REQUESTS_EXCLUDED_URLS="client/.*/info,healthcheck"

will exclude requests such as https://site/client/123/info and https://site/xyz/healthcheck.

API

opentelemetry.instrumentation.requests.get_default_span_name(method)[source]

Default implementation for name_callback, returns HTTP {method_name}. https://opentelemetry.io/docs/reference/specification/trace/semantic_conventions/http/#name

Parameters:: method (str) – string representing HTTP method
Return type:: str
Returns:: span name

class opentelemetry.instrumentation.requests.RequestsInstrumentor(*args, **kwargs)[source]

Bases: BaseInstrumentor

An instrumentor for requests See BaseInstrumentor

instrumentation_dependencies()[source]

Return a list of python packages with versions that the will be instrumented.

The format should be the same as used in requirements.txt or pyproject.toml.

For example, if an instrumentation instruments requests 1.x, this method should look like: :rtype: Collection[str]

def instrumentation_dependencies(self) -> Collection[str]:
return [‘requests ~= 1.0’]

This will ensure that the instrumentation will only be used when the specified library is present in the environment.

static uninstrument_session(session)[source]: Disables instrumentation on the session object.