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name: observability-edot-python-instrument description: > Instrument a Python application with the Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry (EDOT) Python agent for automatic tracing, metrics, and logs. Use when adding observability to a Python service that has no existing APM agent. metadata: author: elastic version: 0.1.0

EDOT Python Instrumentation

Read the setup guide before making changes:

• EDOT Python setup
• EDOT Python configuration
• OpenTelemetry Python auto-instrumentation

Guidelines

1. Install elastic-opentelemetry via pip (add to requirements.txt or equivalent)
2. Run edot-bootstrap --action=install during image build to install auto-instrumentation packages for detected libraries
3. Wrap the application entrypoint with opentelemetry-instrument — e.g. opentelemetry-instrument gunicorn app:app or opentelemetry-instrument python app.py. Without this, no telemetry is collected
4. Set exactly three required environment variables:
   • OTEL_SERVICE_NAME
   • OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT — must be the managed OTLP endpoint or EDOT Collector URL. Never use an APM Server URL (no apm-server, no :8200, no /intake/v2/events)
   • OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS — "Authorization=ApiKey <key>" or "Authorization=Bearer <token>"
5. Do NOT set OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER, OTEL_METRICS_EXPORTER, or OTEL_LOGS_EXPORTER — the defaults are already correct
6. Do NOT add code-level SDK setup (no TracerProvider, no configure_azure_monitor, etc.) — opentelemetry-instrument handles everything
7. Never run both classic elastic-apm and EDOT on the same application

Examples

See the EDOT Python setup guide for complete examples.