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Flask

Send traces to Last9 from a Flask app using OpenTelemetry

Introduction​

Flask is a lightweight WSGI web application framework. This comprehensive guide will help you instrument your Flask application with OpenTelemetry and smoothly send the traces to a Last9 cluster. You can also check out the example application on GitHub↗.

Pre-requisites​

  1. You have a Flask application
  2. You have signed up for Last9, created a cluster, and obtained the following OTLP credentials from the Integrations page:
    • endpoint
    • auth_header

Install OpenTelemetry packages​

To install the required packages, run the following command:

pip install python-dotenv opentelemetry-distro opentelemetry-exporter-otlp

After, installing the required packages, run the following command to install the required instrumentation packages:

opentelemetry-bootstrap -a install
tip

To know more about them, you can check: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/languages/python/libraries/

Set the environment variables​

Now, that you've installed all the packages. Run the following command to initialize environment variables:

export OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=flask-app
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=<ENDPOINT>
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS="Authorization=<BASIC_AUTH_HEADER>"
export OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER=otlp
export OTEL_METRICS_EXPORTER=otlp

Note: Replace <BASIC_AUTH_HEADER> with the URL encoded value of the basic auth header.

Run the application​

After setting the environment variables, run the Flask application:

opentelemetry-instrument flask run

Visualize data​

After running the Flask app, you can visualize the traces in the Last9's APM dashboard.

image

Troubleshooting​

Please get in touch with us on Discord or Email if you have any questions.