@aksparadise/otel-observability

v1.1.26

Published

a month ago

Production-ready OpenTelemetry plugin for SigNoz and Grafana observability. Minimal setup for Node.js, Express, NestJS, Next.js. Automatic instrumentation, distributed tracing, metrics, and logging. Created by AksParadise.

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@aksparadise/otel-observability

📖 Table of Contents

🕵️ Why This Library? (The Cost of Observability Drift)

Most development teams start with the best intentions, copy-pasting a custom 200+ line OpenTelemetry bootstrap file across their services.

Within months, those files diverge. You suffer from Observability Drift:

Traces break mid-request because Service A samples at 100% while Service B samples at 10%.
Debugging requires manual lookup because console logs do not contain active Trace IDs.
Unified dashboards break because one service exports via custom JSON and another via OTLP.
Critical spans are missing because of inconsistent middleware registration order across projects.

@aksparadise/otel-observability acts as an enforceable governance layer. By introducing it as a shared core dependency across your fleet, every service automatically adopts identical instrumentation, exporters, security filters, and defaults by design.

🧠 What This Actually Does

This library is an opinionated, pre-packaged distribution of the official OpenTelemetry SDK. It wraps standard modules without adding a custom runtime engine, avoiding any vendor lock-in.

Zero Boilerplate Initialization: Automatically sets up trace providers, metric readers, and log processors.
Auto-Instrumentation: Plugs directly into Express, NestJS, Next.js, Mongoose, Redis, and GraphQL.
Correlated Structured Logs: Monkeypatches standard console logs to insert active trace context (trace_id and span_id) automatically.
Global Crash Safeguards: Catches uncaught exceptions and unhandled promise rejections, recording complete stack traces before the process exits.
High Performance: Minimal runtime overhead (<2ms initialization time) and optimized memory footprint.

⚡ Quick Start & ESM Preloading (Avoiding the Hoisting Trap)

In Node.js, auto-instrumentation works by monkey-patching modules (like express, mongoose, or redis) at load-time.

[!WARNING] The ESM "Hoisting" Trap:
In ES Modules (ESM), Node.js evaluates and executes all static import statements before running any top-level inline code. Writing:
import { setup } from "@aksparadise/otel-observability";
await setup();
import express from "express"; // This will NOT be instrumented!
will fail because the express import is hoisted and executed before setup() can run. To prevent this, always initialize OpenTelemetry using preloading.

1. For ES Modules (ESM - Recommended for Node 20+)

Create an instrumentation.js file in your root folder:

// instrumentation.js
import "dotenv/config";
import { setup } from "@aksparadise/otel-observability";

await setup();

Boot your application using the --import flag to preload the instrumentation before module resolution starts:

node --import ./instrumentation.js app.js

2. For CommonJS (CJS)

Create an instrumentation.js file:

// instrumentation.js
require("dotenv").config();
const { setup } = require("@aksparadise/otel-observability");

setup();

Boot your application by preloading the instrumentation script with the -r flag:

node -r ./instrumentation.js app.js

🚀 Framework Recipes

To prevent runtime anomalies and ensure seamless compilation, follow these framework-specific integration recipes:

Next.js Recipe

Next.js compiles serverless environments dynamically. Its Edge Runtime does not support native Node.js core modules. To prevent build-time crashes, initialize OpenTelemetry inside Next's native instrumentation.ts file using conditional dynamic imports:

Enable experimental instrumentation inside your next.config.js:

// next.config.js
module.exports = {
    experimental: {
        instrumentationHook: true,
    },
};

Create your instrumentation hook (instrumentation.ts in your root or src/ directory):

// instrumentation.ts
export async function register() {
    // Only run telemetry on the server-side Node.js runtime, skipping Edge/Client
    if (process.env.NEXT_RUNTIME === "nodejs") {
        const { setup } = await import("@aksparadise/otel-observability");
        await setup({ framework: "nextjs" });
    }
}

NestJS Recipe

NestJS is a modular TypeScript framework. Instead of using command-line flags, you can easily bootstrap telemetry by creating a standalone instrumentation.ts and calling it statically at the top of your main.ts file:

Create an instrumentation.ts in your src/ directory:

// src/instrumentation.ts
import "dotenv/config";
import { setup } from "@aksparadise/otel-observability";

// Automatically configures the NestJS-specific logger proxy
await setup({ framework: "nestjs" });

Statically import it as the first line of your src/main.ts before NestJS is evaluated:

// src/main.ts
import "./instrumentation"; // MUST be the first import!
import { NestFactory } from "@nestjs/core";
import { AppModule } from "./app.module";

async function bootstrap() {
    // Pass the auto-configured logger to NestJS
    const app = await NestFactory.create(AppModule, {
        logger: globalThis.logger ?? undefined,
    });

    await app.listen(3000);
}

bootstrap();

Express / Vanilla Node.js Recipe

Once you have created your instrumentation.js file as shown in the Quick Start section, write your standard server code normally inside app.js without any telemetry boilerplate:

// app.js
import { otelContextMiddleware } from "@aksparadise/otel-observability/middleware";
import express from "express";

const app = express();

// Injects user/tenant ID into tracing spans from request headers
app.use(otelContextMiddleware);

app.get("/api/data", (req, res) => {
    res.json({ message: "Hello from traced endpoint!" });
});

app.listen(3000, () => {
    console.log("Server running on port 3000");
});

Run using the preload flag:

node --import ./instrumentation.js app.js

🏗️ Architecture Model

The package acts as a transparent, high-performance standardization bridge between your code and the OpenTelemetry specifications.

flowchart TD
    subgraph AppServer["Node.js Application Context"]
        A["Your App Code"] -->|1. Uses standard| B["Console & SDK API"]
        B -->|2. Intercepted by| C["@aksparadise/otel-observability"]
        C -->|3. Controls & Configures| D["Official OpenTelemetry SDK"]
    end
    
    subgraph Exporters["High-Performance Pipeline"]
        D -->|Traces (HTTP/OTLP)| E["OTLP Trace Exporter"]
        D -->|Metrics (HTTP/OTLP)| F["OTLP Metric Reader"]
        D -->|Logs (HTTP/OTLP)| G["OTLP Log Exporter"]
    end

    subgraph BackendGateway["Collector Gateway"]
        E & F & G --> H["OTLP Collector (SigNoz, Grafana, custom)"]
    end
    
    subgraph Dashboards["Observability UI"]
        H --> I["SigNoz Dashboard"]
        H --> J["Grafana Tempo / Loki"]
    end

📦 What Gets Standardized

When you adopt setup(), your services align with Observability Contract v1:

Distributed Tracing: Standard W3C Context Propagation format, OTLP exporting, and safe ratio-based sampling.
Telemetry Metrics: Periodic, non-blocking metrics exporting.
Unified Structured Logging: Correlated JSON formatting with automated trace injection (trace_id and span_id).
Automatic Instrumentations: Pre-configured filters for HTTP, Express, GraphQL, Mongoose, and ioredis.
Data Security: Instant circular-safe sanitization of PII (redacting fields like password, token, apiKey, and authorization headers).

⚙️ Configuration Reference

The library can be configured dynamically through environment variables or programmatically in code.

1. Configuration via Environment Variables

The library natively respects standard OpenTelemetry environment variables, which can be configured directly inside your .env or container definitions (Kubernetes, Docker, AWS ECS):

2. Configuration via Code: `setup()` API

You can override defaults or configure specific behaviors programmatically by passing configuration options directly to setup():

import { setup } from "@aksparadise/otel-observability";

const observability = await setup({
    framework: "express",            // Force specific framework context: 'express' | 'nestjs' | 'nextjs' | 'vanilla'
    enableConsoleOutput: true,       // Print color-coded structured logs locally to process.stdout
    enableOtelOutput: true,          // Export generated logs to OTLP collector
    enableMonkeypatch: true,         // Intercept standard console.log/info/warn/error calls to correlate trace contexts
    consoleColors: true,             // Enable colorized formatting on local developer terminal outputs
});

[!TIP] 💡 Pro-Tip: TypeScript UX & Autocomplete
This library includes fully integrated, first-class TypeScript definition files (.d.ts). When using modern IDEs (like VS Code or WebStorm), you will automatically receive context-aware parameter autocomplete, validation checks, and inline documentation hover effects when constructing options inside setup().

💡 Advanced Telemetry Usage

Custom Tracing Spans

Easily wrap slow asynchronous tasks or critical business operations inside a dedicated tracer span:

import { withSpan } from "@aksparadise/otel-observability";

const data = await withSpan("payment.process", async (span) => {
    // Enrich span with business metadata
    span.setAttribute("payment.amount", 49.99);
    span.setAttribute("payment.currency", "USD");

    return await chargeCreditCard();
});

Correlated Structured Logging

Option A: Using the built-in Logger (Zero Setup)

Use the package logger to output sanitized, fully correlated JSON logs automatically matched with the active trace context:

import { logger } from "@aksparadise/otel-observability/logger";

// Contains active traceId and spanId if executed within an HTTP request lifecycle
logger.info("Order processed successfully", {
    orderId: "ord_98765",
    itemsCount: 3,
});

Option B: Using custom Loggers (Pino, Winston)

If you already use Winston or Pino, @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node automatically hooks into them. Active trace_id and span_id are automatically injected into your logging payloads without changing your application code:

import pino from "pino";
const customLogger = pino();

// The underlying OTel hooks inject active trace contexts into this payload automatically!
customLogger.info("User completed authentication");

Custom Metrics Counters & Histograms

Capture runtime performance characteristics by generating standard metrics instruments:

import { createCounter, createHistogram } from "@aksparadise/otel-observability";

// 1. Set up metrics instruments
const signupCounter = createCounter("user_signups_total", {
    description: "Total registered accounts",
});
const dbDuration = createHistogram("database_query_duration_ms", {
    description: "Time spent running database queries",
    unit: "ms",
});

// 2. Track business events
signupCounter.add(1, { plan: "enterprise" });

// 3. Monitor performance timings
dbDuration.record(42, { table: "users", operation: "SELECT" });

🛠️ Creating Custom Spans & Metrics (Standard OTel API)

To protect your software architecture from vendor lock-in, @aksparadise/otel-observability registers standard OpenTelemetry providers globally. This means you can import and use the standard, official @opentelemetry/api package anywhere in your application, and manual telemetry will be captured and exported seamlessly alongside automatic auto-instrumentations.

1. Install the official API

npm install @opentelemetry/api

2. Construct Custom Trace Spans

Use the standard tracer API anywhere in your code to group operations and assign custom context metrics:

import { trace, SpanStatusCode } from "@opentelemetry/api";

const tracer = trace.getTracer("my-application");

// Create a custom trace block
await tracer.startActiveSpan("process-payment", async (span) => {
    try {
        // Your business logic here
        span.setAttribute("payment.amount", 99.99);
        span.setAttribute("payment.gateway", "stripe");
        
        await processStripeTransaction();

        span.setStatus({ code: SpanStatusCode.OK });
    } catch (error) {
        // Record crashes with trace-linked exception details
        span.recordException(error as Error);
        span.setStatus({
            code: SpanStatusCode.ERROR, // or code: 2
            message: (error as Error).message
        });
        throw error;
    } finally {
        span.end(); // Always close your spans!
    }
});

🔒 Built-In PII Redaction, Attribute Scrubbing & Sensitive Data Masking

Enterprise teams must ensure that personally identifiable information (PII), passwords, or authorization headers never leave their environment. @aksparadise/otel-observability features automated trace-level attribute scrubbing and a circular-safe sanitization engine to prevent data leaks.

1. Automatic Trace Attribute Scrubbing

By default, standard database and HTTP headers might contain sensitive data. The library's CustomSpanProcessor automatically filters and redacts values for attributes containing sensitive keys: authorization, password, secret, token, apikey, api_key, credit_card.

2. Programmatic Span Interception (onSpanStart & onSpanEnd)

For advanced, fine-grained control, you can define custom lifecycle hooks directly when bootstrapping the library to redact, rewrite, or inject attributes before spans are dispatched:

import { setup } from "@aksparadise/otel-observability";

await setup({
    // Intercept and sanitize attributes on span closure
    onSpanEnd: (span) => {
        // Custom header redaction
        if (span.attributes["http.request.header.authorization"]) {
            span.attributes["http.request.header.authorization"] = "[REDACTED]";
        }
        
        // Inject custom metadata dynamically
        span.attributes["custom.meta.version"] = "1.1.25";
    }
});

3. Automatic Object & Query Parameter Sanitizer

Our circular-safe sanitization engine automatically filters application logging arguments and objects before they leave your system.

import { configureSensitiveFields, sanitize } from "@aksparadise/otel-observability/sanitizer";

// 1. Append custom sensitive identifiers to the automatic redaction list
configureSensitiveFields(["tax_id", "medical_record_number"], true);

// 2. Circular-Safe Engineering tracks object graphs to prevent memory overflows
const parent: any = { name: "John Doe" };
parent.self = parent; // Circular reference

// Safely returns: { name: 'John Doe', self: '[Circular]' }
const safeOutput = sanitize(parent);

🌐 Distributed Tracing & W3C Context Propagation

Distributed tracing's superpower is linking a frontend HTTP request to a backend API call, and then to a database query. For this to work across different servers, W3C trace context headers must be propagated.

┌───────────────┐                  ┌───────────────┐
│   Service A   │ ──(HTTP Call)──> │   Service B   │
│               │  traceparent     │               │
│ (Starts Trace)│  tracestate      │ (Child Spans) │
└───────────────┘                  └───────────────┘

This library automatically configures W3C context propagation out of the box:

Automatic Header Injection: When Service A issues an HTTP call via fetch, axios, or standard http, standard traceparent and tracestate headers are automatically injected into the request headers.
Automatic Header Extraction: When Service B receives the incoming HTTP request, the auto-instrumentation hooks extract these headers and automatically nest Service B's spans as children of the parent trace.
Zero Setup Required: This entire handoff occurs seamlessly across your microservice fleet with no manual context-passing, request wrapping, or custom code modifications.

🧪 Running Tests & CI/CD Isolation

In test runner environments (like Vitest, Jest, or Mocha) or CI pipelines, developers do not want OpenTelemetry trying to connect to a real collector, which can cause network timeout errors, slow down test suites, or clutter development dashboards.

1. Conditionally Skip Initialization

Skip bootstrapping setup during test suite runs entirely:

// instrumentation.js
import { setup } from "@aksparadise/otel-observability";

// Only run telemetry in actual runtime environments, not test runner sessions
if (process.env.NODE_ENV !== "test" && process.env.VITEST !== "true") {
    await setup();
}

2. Direct Telemetry to Console Instead of Collector

Or, you can route all telemetry data directly to stdout/console inside test configurations:

await setup({
    exporter: "console" // Prints traces, metrics, and logs directly to console/stdout
});

3. Disable via Environment Variables

Alternatively, disable OpenTelemetry entirely by specifying:

OTEL_ENABLED=false

⚡ Performance, Overhead & Memory Transparency

Enterprise infrastructure teams prioritize transparency regarding memory safety, CPU footprint, and performance:

Initialization Benchmarks: Executing setup() takes under 2ms. Telemetry exporters run fully asynchronously on Node's native event loop, avoiding main-thread request blocking.
Zero Custom Polling Loops: The library relies entirely on the official @opentelemetry/sdk-node garbage collection patterns. It introduces no custom intervals, polling loops, or memory caches, guaranteeing a flat and stable memory footprint under heavy load.
Egress Cost Optimization: Control data volume and cloud costs easily by setting OTEL_TRACE_SAMPLING_RATIO to a fractional value (e.g., 0.1 for 10% sampling). It natively integrates with standard OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLER parent-based configurations to suppress redundant traces dynamically.

💻 Local Development vs. Production Guidelines

To avoid excessive egress costs and CPU/Memory overhead, configure your setup variables dynamically between environments.

Local Development Configuration

In development, you want rapid local validation, 100% trace capture, and readable terminal logging:

# .env.development
OTEL_ENABLED=true
OTEL_TRACE_SAMPLING_RATIO=1.0  # Trace 100% of requests
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:4318
OTEL_LOG_LEVEL=debug           # Enable raw OTel diagnostics to trace setup errors

// code
await setup({
    enableConsoleOutput: true,  // Print human-readable color logs to stdout
    consoleColors: true,
    enableMonkeypatch: true,
});

Production Configuration

In high-traffic production environments, use ratio-based sampling, disable verbose terminal logs, and leverage OTel bulk batch exporters to keep performance overhead minimal:

# .env.production
OTEL_ENABLED=true
OTEL_TRACE_SAMPLING_RATIO=0.1  # Trace 10% of requests (adapts to heavy traffic)
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=https://your-production-collector:4318

// code
await setup({
    enableConsoleOutput: false, // Turn off verbose logs to protect process stdout IO
    enableOtelOutput: true,
    enableMonkeypatch: true,
});

❌ When to Use Raw OpenTelemetry Instead

We believe in architectural transparency. Avoid using this library if:

You must write data to multiple collector endpoints simultaneously.
You require non-OTLP protocol exporters (e.g., raw Zipkin or Jaeger UDP packets).
You depend on deep internal customizations of the NodeSDK provider lifecycle hooks.

🔒 Trust, Security & Compliance

Observability wrappers should never act as black boxes. We prioritize security and zero-overhead reliability:

Socket.dev Verifiably Safe (100/100 Rating): Standardized to use zero external runtime dependencies beyond the official OpenTelemetry SDK packages. No custom background collectors or daemon processes are spawned.
Circular-Safe PII Sanitizer: Features a robust automatic sanitizer to redact sensitive payload parameters before export. It safely detects and intercepts circular object references to guarantee zero RangeError overflows.
Opt-Out Log Hijacking: Disable console monkeypatching at any time by configuring the setup options: setup({ enableMonkeypatch: false }).
100% Open Source: Fully auditable codebase available at GitHub.

🧩 Troubleshooting & Silent Failure Diagnostics

OpenTelemetry is designed to fail silently. When misconfigured, it will emit nothing rather than disrupting your application runtime. Use this checklist to debug missing traces:

1. Enable Internal Engine Diagnostics

Enable OpenTelemetry's internal debug logs to see raw connection errors and registration hooks:

OTEL_LOG_LEVEL=debug

Alternatively, print raw OpenTelemetry diagnostic events directly to stdout by configuring the logger explicitly:

import { diag, DiagConsoleLogger, DiagLogLevel } from "@opentelemetry/api";

// Put this at the top of your app to trace connection/payload issues
diag.setLogger(new DiagConsoleLogger(), DiagLogLevel.DEBUG);

2. Double Check Import Order

If databases, HTTP frameworks, or message queue clients are missing spans, check if they are imported after setup() completes. ESM static imports bypass inline sequence rules. You must use the preloading strategies (--import or -r flags) shown in the Quick Start section.

3. Check Endpoint Network & Port Protocol

If running Node.js inside a Docker container, localhost:4318 resolves to the container itself, not your host machine.
- Fix: Update your OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT to point to your Docker gateway (e.g., http://host.docker.internal:4318) or your collector service name (e.g., http://otel-collector:4318).
Protocol Port Mismatch: Verify if your collector expects gRPC (usually port 4317) or HTTP/Protobuf (usually port 4318). This package defaults to OTLP over HTTP, so verify your endpoint URL ends in port 4318.

🙋 FAQ

Q: How does this package maintain a 100/100 security score?

A: By strictly adhering to zero non-essential runtime dependencies and running regular dependency audits (npm audit and Socket.dev scanners) to prevent third-party security vulnerabilities.

Q: Can I run this package alongside an existing OpenTelemetry configuration?

A: To avoid duplication or conflicts, we recommend replacing any manual OTel bootstrapping code with a call to setup(). Your existing manual custom spans, loggers, and metrics will continue to work seamlessly.

Q: Does this package support Grafana Cloud?

A: Yes. Configure OTEL_BACKEND=grafana, set GRAFANA_OTEL_ENDPOINT to your stack's endpoint, and provide your GRAFANA_API_KEY.

📚 Documentation Directory

Published

Vulnerabilities

Links

Maintainers

Keywords

Readme

@aksparadise/otel-observability

📖 Table of Contents

🕵️ Why This Library? (The Cost of Observability Drift)

🧠 What This Actually Does

⚡ Quick Start & ESM Preloading (Avoiding the Hoisting Trap)

1. For ES Modules (ESM - Recommended for Node 20+)

2. For CommonJS (CJS)

🚀 Framework Recipes

Next.js Recipe

NestJS Recipe

Express / Vanilla Node.js Recipe

🏗️ Architecture Model

📦 What Gets Standardized

⚙️ Configuration Reference

1. Configuration via Environment Variables

2. Configuration via Code: setup() API

💡 Advanced Telemetry Usage

Custom Tracing Spans

Correlated Structured Logging

Option A: Using the built-in Logger (Zero Setup)

Option B: Using custom Loggers (Pino, Winston)

Custom Metrics Counters & Histograms

🛠️ Creating Custom Spans & Metrics (Standard OTel API)

1. Install the official API

2. Construct Custom Trace Spans

🔒 Built-In PII Redaction, Attribute Scrubbing & Sensitive Data Masking

1. Automatic Trace Attribute Scrubbing

2. Programmatic Span Interception (onSpanStart & onSpanEnd)

3. Automatic Object & Query Parameter Sanitizer

🌐 Distributed Tracing & W3C Context Propagation

🧪 Running Tests & CI/CD Isolation

1. Conditionally Skip Initialization

2. Direct Telemetry to Console Instead of Collector

3. Disable via Environment Variables

⚡ Performance, Overhead & Memory Transparency

💻 Local Development vs. Production Guidelines

Local Development Configuration

Production Configuration

❌ When to Use Raw OpenTelemetry Instead

🔒 Trust, Security & Compliance

🧩 Troubleshooting & Silent Failure Diagnostics

1. Enable Internal Engine Diagnostics

2. Double Check Import Order

3. Check Endpoint Network & Port Protocol

🙋 FAQ

Q: How does this package maintain a 100/100 security score?

Q: Can I run this package alongside an existing OpenTelemetry configuration?

Q: Does this package support Grafana Cloud?

📚 Documentation Directory

License

2. Configuration via Code: `setup()` API