From the course: Mastering Observability with OpenTelemetry

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What is (auto) instrumentation?

What is (auto) instrumentation?

- [Instructor] I talked about context propagation before, and I treated this a little bit like a black box. In fact, making this work is rather complex. We call this instrumentation. Instrumentation is code that is added to your app and it starts traces, it extracts trace context from inbound requests, it creates spans that represent operations, it collects telemetry data, it adds trace context to outbound requests, and it sends telemetry data to a backend. You might have guessed that no one wants to do this manually, and this is where auto-instrumentation comes into play. Auto-instrumentation automatically adds observability features like tracing and metrics collection to applications without requiring manual code changes. Depending on the platform, this usually means loading a library that changes your code during runtime. This is often referred to as monkey patching. Auto-instrumentation also goes beyond just context propagation and creating inbound and outbound spans. It usually…

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