Add support for OpenTelemetry config

[matthewwjones]

Background

We're using Renovate in a large enterprise. It's great to see that there is support for capturing traces via OpenTelemetry - thank you for that!

We would like to be able to configure OpenTelemetry so that we can differentiate trace traffic originating from Renovate from the large volumes of trace traffic we have from other components.

What I have tried

To do this, I've tried to do this using the following environment variables:

export OTEL_SERVICE_NAME="our-chosen-service-name"
export OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES="collection of comma separated key=value pairs"

These two settings are particularly important.

Checking the output in the logs after having enabled trace debugging with the RENOVATE_TRACING_CONSOLE_EXPORTER env var, I see:

  resource: {
    attributes: {
      'service.name': 'renovate',
      'telemetry.sdk.language': 'nodejs',
      'telemetry.sdk.name': 'opentelemetry',
      'telemetry.sdk.version': '1.24.0',
      'service.namespace': 'renovatebot.com',
      'service.version': '37.334.0'
    }
  },

The configuration provided in https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate/blob/main/lib/instrumentation/index.ts#L43 takes precendence over the OTEL_* env vars that we've set.

What I'm requesting

I think exposing Telemetry configuration via the config.js would be great, or only setting the resource attributes above if OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES is not set in the environment.

[secustor]

To allow setting attributes using Admin/Bot configs which will take precedence to our variables sounds good.

Don't like the OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES variant as that would not allow to selectively overwrite attributes e.g. the service name, but keep the version.

[matthewwjones]

Thank you for writing up an issue @secustor. To check that I understand correctly - will your proposal allow us to set our own OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES too?

This use case is pretty important for us as a mechanism to classify trace traffic.

[secustor]

The OTEL SDK should pick up that up already.

How I understood your problem is that it is not possible to overwrite the attributes above.m, correct?

[matthewwjones]

What I see at the moment is that OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES doesn't get picked up. For example, I can do:

export OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES="foo=bar"
export RENOVATE_TRACING_CONSOLE_EXPORTER=true

and then:

npx renovate

But there is no sign of foo=bar in the verbose output:

{
  resource: {
    attributes: {
      'service.name': 'renovate',
      'telemetry.sdk.language': 'nodejs',
      'telemetry.sdk.name': 'opentelemetry',
      'telemetry.sdk.version': '1.24.0',
      'service.namespace': 'renovatebot.com',
      'service.version': '37.354.2'
    }
  },
  traceId: '3dd540a68d4a35eabc492c195a4fc6d6',
  parentId: undefined,
  traceState: undefined,
  name: 'run',
  id: '2b40f10e45d63d18',
  kind: 0,
  timestamp: 1715594415054000,
  duration: 12847512.9,
  attributes: {},
  status: { code: 0 },
  events: [],
  links: []
}

Does that help to clarify?

[secustor]

Yes, the reason is that we do not run the EnvDetector. That one is included in NodeAutoInstrumentations, which we currently not using. See #29026

[matthewwjones]

Understood, thank you for explaining and for raising the issue.