Lumigo OpenTelemetry Distro for Node.js

This is the source repository of @lumigo/opentelemetry, Lumigo OpenTelemetry Distribution for Node.js, intended for use with containerized applications.

The Lumigo OpenTelemetry Distribution for Node.js is made of several upstream OpenTelemetry packaged, additional automated quality-assurance and customizations that optimize for no-code injection, meaning that you should need to update exactly zero lines of code in your application in order to make use of the Lumigo OpenTelemetry Distribution. (See the No-code activation section for auto-instrumentation instructions)

Note: If you are looking for the Lumigo Node.js tracer for AWS Lambda functions, @lumigo/tracer is the package you should use instead.

Setup

Add @lumigo/opentelemetry as dependency

Add @lumigo/opentelemetry as a dependency using your preferred package manager:

npm install @lumigo/opentelemetry

or:

yarn add @lumigo/opentelemetry

Environment-based configuration

For both manual and no-code instrumentation, you will need to configure the LUMIGO_TRACER_TOKEN environment variable with the token value generated for you by the Lumigo platform, under Settings --> Tracing --> Manual tracing, and the OTEL_SERVICE_NAME environment variable with the service name you've chosen:

# Replace `<token>` below with the token generated for you by the Lumigo platform
export LUMIGO_TRACER_TOKEN=<token>
# Replace `<service name> with the desired name of the service`
export OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=<service name>

Tracer activation

There are two ways to activate the @lumigo/opentelemetry package: one based on importing the package in code (manual activation), and the other via the environment (no-code activation). The no-code activation approach is the preferred one.

No-code activation

Note: The instructions in this section are mutually exclusive with those provided in the Manual instrumentation section.

Set the following environment variable for your Node.js process:

export NODE_OPTIONS="${NODE_OPTIONS} -r '@lumigo/opentelemetry'"

The line above avoids overriding any other settings you may have passed via the NODE_OPTIONS environment variable.

Manual activation

Note: The instructions in this section are mutually exclusive with those provided in the No-code activation section.

Import @lumigo/opentelemetry at the beginning of your main file:

// javascript
const lumigo = require("@lumigo/opentelemetry");

// typescript
import * as lumigo from "@lumigo/opentelemetry";

See Waiting for the initialization of the Lumigo OpenTelemetry Distro regarding initialization behavior.

Setup for npm package.json start script

{
    "scripts": {
        "start": "LUMIGO_TRACER_TOKEN=<token> OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=<service name> node -r @lumigo/opentelemetry <main_file>.js"
    }
}

Configuration

OpenTelemetry configurations

The Lumigo OpenTelemetry Distro for Node.js is made of several upstream OpenTelemetry packages as well as some additional logic and, as such, the environment variables that work with "vanilla" OpenTelemetry work also with the Lumigo OpenTelemetry Distro for Node.js. Specifically supported are:

• General configurations
• Batch span processor configurations: The Lumigo OpenTelemetry Distro for Node.js uses a batch processor for sending data to Lumigo.

Lumigo-specific configurations

@lumigo/opentelemetry additionally supports the following configuration options as environment variables:

• LUMIGO_TRACER_TOKEN=<token>: Configure the Lumigo token to enable to upload of telemetry to Lumigo; without this environment variable, your Node.js process will not send telemetry to Lumigo.

• LUMIGO_DEBUG=TRUE: Enables debug logging

• LUMIGO_DEBUG_SPANDUMP=<path|console:log|console:error>: Log all spans collected to the <path> file or, the value is console:log or console:error, to console.log or console.error; this is an option intended only for debugging purposes and should not be used in production. This setting is independent from LUMIGO_DEBUG, that is, LUMIGO_DEBUG does not need to additionally be set for LUMIGO_DEBUG_SPANDUMP to work.

• LUMIGO_REPORT_DEPENDENCIES=false: This option disables the built-in dependency reporting to Lumigo SaaS. For more information, refer to the Automated dependency reporting section.

• LUMIGO_SWITCH_OFF=TRUE: This option disables the Lumigo OpenTelemetry Distro entirely; no instrumentation will be injected, no tracing data will be collected.

• LUMIGO_AUTO_FILTER_EMPTY_SQS: This option enables the automatic filtering of empty SQS messages from being sent to Lumigo SaaS. For more information, refer to the Filtering out empty SQS messages section.

• LUMIGO_SECRET_MASKING_REGEX='["regex1", "regex2"]': Prevents Lumigo from sending keys that match the supplied regular expressions in process environment data, HTTP headers, payloads and queries. All regular expressions are case-insensitive. The "magic" value all will redact everything. By default, Lumigo applies the following regular expressions: [".*pass.*", ".*key.*", ".*secret.*", ".*credential.*", ".*passphrase.*"]. More fine-grained settings can be applied via the following environment variables, which will override LUMIGO_SECRET_MASKING_REGEX for a specific type of data:

  • LUMIGO_SECRET_MASKING_REGEX_HTTP_REQUEST_BODIES applies secret redaction to HTTP request bodies
  • LUMIGO_SECRET_MASKING_REGEX_HTTP_REQUEST_HEADERS applies secret redaction to HTTP request headers
  • LUMIGO_SECRET_MASKING_REGEX_HTTP_QUERY_PARAMS applies secret redaction to HTTP query parameters
  • LUMIGO_SECRET_MASKING_REGEX_HTTP_RESPONSE_BODIES applies secret redaction to HTTP response bodies
  • LUMIGO_SECRET_MASKING_REGEX_HTTP_RESPONSE_HEADERS applies secret redaction to HTTP response bodies
  • LUMIGO_SECRET_MASKING_REGEX_ENVIRONMENT applies secret redaction to process environment variables (that is, the content of process.env)

• LUMIGO_FILTER_HTTP_ENDPOINTS_REGEX='["regex1", "regex2"]': This option enables the filtering of client and server endpoints through regular expression searches. Fine-tune your settings via the following environment variables, which work in conjunction with LUMIGO_FILTER_HTTP_ENDPOINTS_REGEX for a specific span type:

  • LUMIGO_FILTER_HTTP_ENDPOINTS_REGEX_SERVER applies the regular expression search exclusively to server spans. Searching is performed against the following attributes on a span: url.path and http.target.
  • LUMIGO_FILTER_HTTP_ENDPOINTS_REGEX_CLIENT applies the regular expression search exclusively to client spans. Searching is performed against the following attributes on a span: url.full and http.url.

  For more information check out Filtering http endpoints.

Execution Tags

Execution Tags allow you to dynamically add dimensions to your invocations so that they can be identified, searched for, and filtered in Lumigo. For example: in multi-tenanted systems, execution tags are often used to mark with the identifiers of the end-users that trigger them for analysis (e.g., Explore view) and alerting purposes.

Creating Execution Tags

In the Lumigo OpenTelemetry Distro for JS, execution tags are represented as span attributes and, specifically, as span attributes with the lumigo.execution_tags. prefix. For example, you could add an execution tag as follows:

// Typescript
import { trace } from '@opentelemetry/api';

/*
 * In Node.js 14+, the '?' coalescing operator ensures that your code is
 * safe even if the tracing is not active, and `trace.getActiveSpan()` returns
 * `undefined`.
 */
trace.getActiveSpan()?.setAttribute('lumigo.execution_tags.foo','bar');

// Javascript
const { trace } = require('@opentelemetry/api');

/*
 * In Node.js 14+, the '?' coalescing operator ensures that your code is
 * safe even if the tracing is not active, and `trace.getActiveSpan()` returns
 * `undefined`.
 */
trace.getActiveSpan()?.setAttribute('lumigo.execution_tags.foo','bar');

Notice that, using OpenTelemetry's trace.getActiveSpan() API, you do not need to keep track of the current span, you can get it at any point of your program execution.

In OpenTelemetry, span attributes can be strings, numbers (double precision floating point or signed 64 bit integer), booleans (a.k.a. "primitive types"), and arrays of one primitive type (e.g., an array of string, and array of numbers or an array of booleans). In Lumigo, booleans and numbers are transformed to strings.

IMPORTANT: If you use the Span.setAttribute API multiple times on the same span to set values for the same key multiple values, you may override previous values rather than adding to them:

// Typescript
import { trace } from '@opentelemetry/api';

trace.getActiveSpan()?.setAttribute('lumigo.execution_tags.foo', 'bar');
trace.getActiveSpan()?.setAttribute('lumigo.execution_tags.foo', 'baz');

// Javascript
const { trace } = require('@opentelemetry/api');

trace.getActiveSpan()?.setAttribute('lumigo.execution_tags.foo', 'bar');
trace.getActiveSpan()?.setAttribute('lumigo.execution_tags.foo', 'baz');

In the snippets above, the foo execution tag will have in Lumigo only the baz value! Multiple values for an execution tag are supported as follows:

// Typescript
import { trace } from '@opentelemetry/api';

trace.getActiveSpan()?.setAttribute('lumigo.execution_tags.foo', ['bar', 'baz']);

// Javascript
const { trace } = require('@opentelemetry/api');

trace.getActiveSpan()?.setAttribute('lumigo.execution_tags.foo', ['bar', 'baz']);

The snippets above will produce in Lumigo the foo tag having both bar and baz values. Another option to set multiple values is setting execution Tags in different spans of an invocation.

Execution Tags in different spans of an invocation

In Lumigo, multiple spans may be merged together into one invocation, which is the entry that you see, for example, in the Explore view. The invocation will include all execution tags on all its spans, and merge their values:

// Javascript
const { trace } = require('@opentelemetry/api');

trace.getActiveSpan()?.setAttribute('lumigo.execution_tags.foo','bar');

const tracer = tracerProvider.getTracer(__filename)

const nestedSpan = tracer.startSpan('child_span');

// Do something interesting
nestedSpan.setAttribute('lumigo.execution_tags.foo','baz');

nestedSpan.end();

// Typescript
const tracer = tracerProvider.getTracer(__filename)

trace.getActiveSpan()?.setAttribute('lumigo.execution_tags.foo','bar');

const tracer = tracerProvider.getTracer(__filename)

const nestedSpan = tracer.startSpan('child_span');

// Do something interesting
nestedSpan.setAttribute('lumigo.execution_tags.foo','baz');

nestedSpan.end();

In the examples above, the invocation in Lumigo resulting from executing the code will have both bar and baz values associated with the foo execution tag. Which spans are merged in the same invocation depends on the parent-child relations among those spans. Explaining this topic is outside the scope of this documentation; a good first read to get deeper into the topic is the Traces documentation of OpenTelemetry. In case your execution tags on different spans appear on different invocations than what you would expect, get in touch with Lumigo support.

Execution Tag Limitations

• Up to 50 execution tag keys per invocation in Lumigo, irrespective of how many spans are part of the invocation or how many values each execution tag has.
• The key of an execution tag cannot contain the . character; for example: lumigo.execution_tags.my.tag is not a valid tag. The OpenTelemetry Span.setAttribute() API will not fail or log warnings, but that will be displayed as my in Lumigo.
• Each execution tag key can be at most 50 characters long; the lumigo.execution_tags. prefix does not count against the 50 characters limit.
• Each execution tag value can be at most 70 characters long.

Programmatic Errors

Programmatic Errors allow you to customize errors, monitor and troubleshoot issues that should not necessarily interfere with the service. For example, an application tries to remove a user who doesn't exist. These custom errors can be captured by adding just a few lines of additional code to your application.

Programmatic Errors indicating that a non-fatal error occurred, such as an application error. You can log programmatic errors, track custom error issues, and trigger Alerts.

Creating a Programmatic Error

Programmatic errors are created by adding span events with a custom attribute being set with the key name lumigo.type.

For example, you could add a programmatic error as follows:

// Typescript
import { trace } from '@opentelemetry/api';

trace.getActiveSpan()?.addEvent('<error-message>', {'lumigo.type': '<error-type>'});

// Javascript
const { trace } = require('@opentelemetry/api');

trace.getActiveSpan()?.addEvent('<error-message>', {'lumigo.type': '<error-type>'});

Supported runtimes

• Node.js: 14.x, 16.x, 18.x, 20.x

Supported packages

Instrumentation	Package	Supported Versions
		14	16	18	20
client-sqs	@aws-sdk/client-sqs	3.525.0	3.525.0	3.525.0	3.525.0
grpc-js	@grpc/grpc-js	1.8.0~1.8.20	1.8.0~1.8.20	1.8.0~1.8.20	1.8.0~1.8.20
core	@nestjs/core		10.3.2	10.3.2	10.3.2
amqplib	amqplib	0.9.0~0.10.3	0.9.0~0.10.3	0.9.0~0.10.3	0.9.0~0.10.3
aws-sdk	aws-sdk	2.1533.0~2.1590.0	2.1533.0~2.1590.0	2.1533.0~2.1590.0	2.1533.0~2.1590.0
express	express	4.9.0~4.19.2	4.9.0~4.19.2	4.9.0~4.19.2	4.9.0~4.19.2
fastify	fastify	3.3.0~3.29.5	3.3.0~3.29.5	3.3.0~3.29.5	3.3.0~3.29.5
		4.0.0	4.0.0	4.0.0	4.0.0
		4.0.1~4.26.2	4.0.1~4.26.2	4.0.1~4.26.2	4.0.1~4.26.2
ioredis	ioredis	4.0.0~4.28.5	4.0.0~4.28.5	4.0.0~4.28.5	4.0.0~4.28.5
		5.0.0~5.3.2	5.0.0~5.3.2	5.0.0~5.3.2	5.0.0~5.3.2
kafkajs	kafkajs	2.0.0~2.2.4	2.0.0~2.2.4	2.0.0~2.2.4	2.0.0~2.2.4
mongodb	mongodb	4.17.0~4.17.2	3.6.6~3.7.3	3.6.6~3.7.3	3.6.6~3.7.3
		5.0.0~5.9.2	4.0.0~4.17.2	4.0.0~4.17.2	4.0.0~4.17.2
			5.0.0~5.9.2	5.0.0~5.9.2	5.0.0~5.9.2
			6.0.0~6.3.0	6.0.0~6.3.0	6.0.0~6.3.0
pg	pg	8.11.3~8.11.4	8.11.3~8.11.4	8.11.3~8.11.4	8.11.3~8.11.4
prisma	prisma	4.2.0~4.16.2	4.2.0~4.16.2	4.2.0~4.16.2	4.2.0~4.16.2
		5.0.0~5.11.0	5.0.0~5.11.0	5.0.0~5.11.0	5.0.0~5.11.0
redis	redis	4.0.0~4.6.8	4.0.0~4.6.13	4.0.0~4.6.13	4.0.0~4.6.13
		4.6.10~4.6.13

Activating your Prisma client's instrumentation

If you're using Prisma and you would like it instrumented, the only thing you will need to do (aside from activating the tracer, of course) is ensure that your schema file's generator client has the tracing preview feature enabled prior to generating the client itself.

generator client {
  provider = "prisma-client-js"
  previewFeatures = ["tracing"]
}

NOTE: There have been reports of a possible bug that interferes with tracing when multiple Prisma clients have been instantiated, see Prisma issue #20779.

Automated dependency reporting

To provide better support and better data-driven product decisions with respect to which packages to support next, the Lumigo OpenTelemetry Distro for JS will report to Lumigo SaaS on startup the packages and their versions used in this application, together with the OpenTelemetry resource data to enable analytics in terms of which platforms use which dependencies.

The data uploaded to Lumigo is a set of key-value pairs with package name and version. Similar is available through the tracing data sent to Lumigo, except that this aims at covering dependencies for which the Lumigo OpenTelemetry Distro for JS does not have instrumentation (yet?). Lumigo's only goal for these analytics data is to be able to give you the instrumentations you need without you needing to tell us!

The dependencies data is sent only when a LUMIGO_TRACER_TOKEN is present in the process environment, and it can be opted out via the LUMIGO_REPORT_DEPENDENCIES=false environment variable.

Baseline setup

The Lumigo OpenTelemetry Distro will automatically create the following OpenTelemetry constructs provided to a NodeTraceProvider.

Resources

A Resource built from the default OpenTelemetry resource with the sdk... attributes, plus:

• The lumigo.distro.version documenting the version of this package

Additional resource attributes depending on the compute platform.

Amazon Elastic Container Service

• cloud.provider with value aws
• cloud.platform with value aws_ecs
• container.name with, as value, the container name as defined in the task definition
• container.id with, as value, the container id as defined by the underpinning Docker runtime

If the Task Metadata endpoint v4 is available (ECS_CONTAINER_METADATA_URI_V4 env var is set), the following resource attributes as specified in the AWS ECS Resource Semantic conventions are also set:

• aws.ecs.container.arn
• aws.ecs.cluster.arn
• aws.ecs.launchtype
• aws.ecs.task.arn
• aws.ecs.task.family
• aws.ecs.task.revision

Kubernetes resource attributes

• k8s.pod.uid with the Pod identifier, supported for both cgroups v1 and v2

Exporters

• If the LUMIGO_TRACER_TOKEN environment variable is set: a BatchSpanProcessor, which uses an OTLPTraceExporter to push tracing data to Lumigo
• If the LUMIGO_DEBUG_SPANDUMP environment variable is set: a SimpleSpanProcessor, which uses an FileSpanExporter to save to file the spans collected. Do not use this in production!

Process resource attributes

• The following process.runtime.* attributes as specified in the Process Semantic Conventions:

  • process.runtime.description
  • process.runtime.name
  • process.runtime.version

• A non-standard process.environ resource attribute, containing a stringified representation of the process environment, with environment variables scrubbed based on the LUMIGO_SECRET_MASKING_REGEX_ENVIRONMENT and LUMIGO_SECRET_MASKING_REGEX environment variables.

SDK configuration

• The following SDK environment variables are supported:

  • OTEL_SPAN_ATTRIBUTE_VALUE_LENGTH_LIMIT
  • OTEL_ATTRIBUTE_VALUE_LENGTH_LIMIT

  ** If the OTEL_SPAN_ATTRIBUTE_VALUE_LENGTH_LIMIT environment variable is not set, the span attribute size limit will be taken from OTEL_ATTRIBUTE_VALUE_LENGTH_LIMIT environment variable. The default size limit when both are not set is 2048.

Advanced use cases

Waiting for the initialization of the Lumigo OpenTelemetry Distro

The initialization of the Lumigo OpenTelemetry Distro is performed asynchronously to avoid potentially blocking behavior.

Due to the asynchronous nature of this initialization logic, some CLI or batch-like applications that perform their logic on startup without needing to wait on external request responses may find that they are missing some of the trace data, for example the first span that represents the startup of the application.

For scenarios in which each and every span is required, the Lumigo OpenTelemetry Distro provides a Promise called init that you can wait on as follows:

Node.js prior to v18

// Node.js prior to v18 (`async` as a top-level construct in your main file is not supported)
import * as lumigo from '@lumigo/opentelemetry';

// Some initialization code for your application.

lumigo.init
.then(()=>{
    // From this point on you are guaranteed that the SDK is initialized.
})
.catch(err => {
   // The sdk initialization failed :-(
   // Please let us know at support@lumigo.io!
});

Node.js v18+

// Node.js v18+ (`async` as a top-level construct in your main file is supported)
import * as lumigo from '@lumigo/opentelemetry';

// Some initialization code for your application.

try {
  await lumigo.init;
} catch (err) {
   // The sdk initialization failed :-(
   // Please let us know at support@lumigo.io!
}

// From this point on you are guaranteed that the SDK is initialized.

Access to the TracerProvider

The Lumigo OpenTelemetry Distro provides access to the TracerProvider it configures (see the Baseline setup section for more information) through the resolution of the init promise:

import * as lumigo from '@lumigo/opentelemetry';
import { Resource } from '@opentelemetry/resources';
import { BasicTracerProvider } from '@opentelemetry/sdk-trace-base';

const tracerProvider: BasicTracerProvider = await lumigo.init.tracerProvider;
// Now you may want to add additional exporters using `tracerProvider.addSpanProcessor(spanProcessor: SpanProcessor)`

// The TracerProvider also provides access to the underpinning resource
const resource: Resource = tracerProvider.resource;

Ensure spans are flushed to Lumigo before shutdown

For short-running processes, the BatchProcessor configured by the Lumigo OpenTelemetry Distro may not ensure that the tracing data are sent to Lumigo (see the baseline setup section for more information). Through the access to the tracerProvider, however, it is possible to ensure that all spans are flushed to Lumigo as follows:

import * as lumigo from '@lumigo/opentelemetry';
import { Resource } from '@opentelemetry/resources';
import { BasicTracerProvider } from '@opentelemetry/sdk-trace-base';

const tracerProvider: BasicTracerProvider = (await lumigo.init).tracerProvider;

// Do some quick logic

try {
  await tracerProvider.forceFlush();
} catch (err) {
  console.error(err);
}

// Now the Node.js process can terminate, with all the spans closed so far sent to Lumigo

Filtering out empty SQS messages

A common pattern in SQS-based applications is to continuously poll an SQS queue for messages, and to process them as they arrive. In order not to clutter the Lumigo platform with empty SQS polling messages, the default behavior is to filter them out from being sent to Lumigo.

You can change this behavior by setting the boolean environment variable LUMIGO_AUTO_FILTER_EMPTY_SQS to FALSE. The possible variations are (case-insensitive):

• LUMIGO_AUTO_FILTER_EMPTY_SQS=TRUE filter out empty SQS polling messages
• LUMIGO_AUTO_FILTER_EMPTY_SQS=FALSE do not filter out empty SQS polling messages
• No environment variable set (default): filter out empty SQS polling messages

Filtering http endpoints

You can selectively filter spans based on HTTP server/client endpoints for various components, not limited to web frameworks.

Global filtering

Set the LUMIGO_FILTER_HTTP_ENDPOINTS_REGEX environment variable to a list of regex strings. Spans with matching server/client endpoints will not be traced.

Specific Filtering

For exclusive server (inbound) or client (outbound) span filtering, use the environment variables:

• LUMIGO_FILTER_HTTP_ENDPOINTS_REGEX_SERVER
• LUMIGO_FILTER_HTTP_ENDPOINTS_REGEX_CLIENT

Notes:

• the environment variable must be a valid JSON array of strings, so if you want to match endpoint with the hostname google.com the environment variable value should be ["google\\.com"].
• If we are filtering out an HTTP call to an opentelemetry traced component, every subsequent invocation made by that component won't be traced either.

Examples:

• Filtering out every incoming HTTP request to the /login endpoint (will also match requests such as /login?user=foo, /login/bar))):
  • LUMIGO_FILTER_HTTP_ENDPOINTS_REGEX_SERVER=["\\/login"]
• Filtering out every outgoing HTTP request to the google.com domain (will also match requests such as google.com/foo, bar.google.com):
  • LUMIGO_FILTER_HTTP_ENDPOINTS_REGEX_CLIENT=["google\\.com"]'
• Filtering out every outgoing HTTP request to https://www.google.com (will also match requests such as https://www.google.com/, https://www.google.com/foo)
  • LUMIGO_FILTER_HTTP_ENDPOINTS_REGEX_CLIENT=["https:\\/\\/www\\.google\\.com"]
• Filtering out every HTTP request (incoming or outgoing) with the word login:
  • LUMIGO_FILTER_HTTP_ENDPOINTS_REGEX=["login"]

Contributing

For guidelines on contributing, please see CONTRIBUTING.md.