[Donation Proposal]: Instrumentation automatic configuration

[atoulme]

Description

Splunk has built a mechanism that intercepts process invocation on hosts, and adds environment variables to set up OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation in the language used by the program, such as Java, Node.js, .NET or Python. Similar to how the operator webhook functions, this allows setting the auto-instrumentation automatically on any Linux host.

We support two separate mechanisms to inject instrumentation SDKs:

• We offer integration via systemd environment variable configuration
• We offer integration via a /etc/preload.so hook that scans process invocations, intercept them and adds environment variables to them.

Benefits to the OpenTelemetry community

This mechanism can be distributed as a deb or rpm package and help increase the adoption of OpenTelemetry, as it would speed up the deployment of OpenTelemetry instrumentations in Linux hosts.

Reasons for donation

This component has reached stability and Splunk is looking to make it an upstream open source component to mutualize maintenance costs and improve it with more community input.

Repository

https://github.com/signalfx/splunk-otel-collector/tree/main/instrumentation

Existing usage

This component is used in production. You can see the current code under https://github.com/signalfx/splunk-otel-collector/tree/main/instrumentation

The current package contains Splunk-specific versions of the instrumentation SDKs. The current package also handles additional optional settings which are specific to these instrumentation SDKs, such as a profiling feature earlier than the adoption of the profiling signal by the OpenTelemetry project.

We expect to discontinue the usage of these features, remove the code that is related to them, as we offer this code upstream.

Maintenance

The existing team will continue to support the code and manage it moving forward, and is actively soliciting and recruiting from the community additional triagers/approvers/maintainers so this project is not tied to Splunk. This proposal acts as a signal to gauge interest and recruit such committers from the community.

Licenses

Apache 2.0 License

Trademarks

No trademarks related to this work are registered.

Other notes

No response