Facilitate no-code instrumentation

[artkhod]

couchnode/lib/cluster.ts

Line 1080 in 7378b6e

typeof this._tracer !== 'undefined' || !tracingExplicitlyDisabled

Since couchbase has decided to instrument the code with OTEL from within the library, that makes it impossible for many consumers to enable OTEL for couchbase across many of their services in a "No-Code" fashion.

To enable otel, the connect configurations may need to be changed across hundreds of services, therefore lengthening the path for customers to enable OTEL, whereas instrumentation libraries allow for a high degree of separation of telemetry intialization & business code.

Therefore please consider 2 points:

• allow tracing config to be configured from env vars (OTEL_CB_TRACING: true or infer that OTEL is enabled from OTEL supported env vars)
• default to fetch the tracer from a registered tracer provider through OTEL trace api.

Those changes would allow customers to benefit from OTEL without any changes to their code.

[thejcfactor]

Hi @artkhod -- Thanks for creating this issue. Completely understand the pain point you have brought up.

To provide some context, the SDK provides "observability" support that is not limited to OpenTelemetry. To keep the SDK vendor-agnostic, we use a custom RequestTracer abstraction layer, and we do not bundle @opentelemetry/api as a hard dependency. Also, while it is common to find separate OTel instrumentation packages, we have to account for the fact that we are a small team maintaining many SDKs across many languages, and building/maintaining a completely separate auto-instrumentation package something we cannot easily take on given our limited bandwidth.

That said, you raise a fair point. I have created JSCBC-1391 in our JIRA system to track this improvement request. I want to chat w/ the team to see if there might be any qualms w/ the names, but the goal would be to have the SDK look for specific environment variables (listed in below and in the JIRA ticket) prior to completing the cluster configuration. The presence/absence/value of these variables would enable the SDK to determine if an OTel tracer and/or meter should be created using the OTel factory functions providing in the SDK.

Couchbase specific:

• COUCHBASE_ENABLE_OTEL_TRACING
• COUCHBASE_ENABLE_OTEL_METRICS

OTel specific:

• OTEL_SDK_DISABLED
• OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER
• OTEL_METRICS_EXPORTER