opentelemetry-rust

What problem does it solve?

This Skill provides expert guidance for instrumenting Rust applications with OpenTelemetry, enabling you to add structured tracing, metrics, and telemetry using the official Rust SDK and OTLP exporters.

Core Features & Use Cases

• Manual instrumentation with the OpenTelemetry Rust API to create spans and propagate context.
• Metrics collection using the OpenTelemetry Rust SDK (counters, histograms, gauges) and OTLP exporters.
• Integration with the tracing crate for structured logging and interoperability.
• HTTP server/client instrumentation for frameworks like Axum, Actix-web, Rocket, and Tonic-based services.
• Resource attributes and semantic conventions to standardize telemetry across services.
• Production-ready patterns: context propagation, error recording, and exporter configuration for scalable observability.

Quick Start

1. Add dependencies to Cargo.toml: [dependencies] opentelemetry = "0.27" opentelemetry-sdk = "0.27" opentelemetry-otlp = "0.27" tokio = { version = "1", features = ["full"] }
2. Initialize tracer/provider at startup and set it as the global provider: use opentelemetry::{global, trace::Tracer}; // Build and install provider, then use global::set_tracer_provider(provider);
3. Create a span around a work unit to instrument code: let tracer = global::tracer("my-service"); tracer.in_span("operation-name", |cx| { // your work here });