OpenTelemetry Support

Using OpenTelemetry with Sentry Performance.

You can configure your OpenTelemetry SDK to send traces and spans to Sentry.

Sentry requires opentelemetry-distro version 0.350b0 or higher.

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pip install --upgrade 'sentry-sdk[opentelemetry]'

Initialize Sentry for tracing and set the instrumenter to otel:

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import sentry_sdk

sentry_sdk.init(
    dsn="https://examplePublicKey@o0.ingest.sentry.io/0",
    enable_tracing=True,

    # set the instrumenter to use OpenTelemetry instead of Sentry
    instrumenter="otel",
)

This disables all Sentry instrumentation and relies on the chosen OpenTelemetry tracers for creating spans.

Next, configure OpenTelemetry as you need and hook in the Sentry span processor and propagator. Here's a minimal example that doesn't require any additional OpenTelemetry setup:

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from opentelemetry import trace
from opentelemetry.propagate import set_global_textmap
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace import TracerProvider
from sentry_sdk.integrations.opentelemetry import SentrySpanProcessor, SentryPropagator

provider = TracerProvider()
provider.add_span_processor(SentrySpanProcessor())
trace.set_tracer_provider(provider)
set_global_textmap(SentryPropagator())

Finally, try it out with:

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import time

tracer = trace.get_tracer(__name__)

with tracer.start_as_current_span("test_otel_span"):
    print("Processing some data...")
    # Simulate some processing
    time.sleep(3)

With Sentry’s OpenTelemetry SDK, an OpenTelemetry Span becomes a Sentry Transaction or Span. The first Span sent through the Sentry SpanProcessor is a Transaction, and any child Span gets attached to the first Transaction upon checking the parent Span context. This is true for the OpenTelemetry root Span and any top level Span in the system. For example, a request sent from frontend to backend will create an OpenTelemetry root Span with a corresponding Sentry Transaction. The backend request will create a new Sentry Transaction for the OpenTelemetry Span. The Sentry Transaction and Span are linked as a trace for navigation and error tracking purposes.

If you need more fine-grained control over Sentry, take a look at the Configuration page. In case you'd like to apply client-side sampling or filter out transactions before sending them to Sentry (to get rid of health checks, for example), you may find the Filtering page helpful.

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