OpenTelemetry Instrumentation Cheat Sheet

Last Updated: November 21, 2025

Focus Areas

Focus
`Initialize the SDK per service with shared resource attributes`
`Propagate context across threads and async boundaries`


         OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=my-app otelcol --config=collector.yaml

Start the collector with environment tagging


         python -m opentelemetry.instrumentation.auto_instrument myapp:app

Auto-instrument supported Python libs


         curl -X POST http://localhost:4318/v1/traces -d @span.json

Verify trace ingestion on the OTLP endpoint

Standardize on OpenTelemetry semantics, send traces/metrics via OTLP, and review exporters after each release.

💡 Pro Tip: Use semantic attributes for service, method, and version while sampling intentionally.