Configure the EDOT Python agent

Elastic Stack Serverless Observability

Configure the Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry Python (EDOT Python) to send data to Elastic.

Configuration method

Configure the OpenTelemetry SDK through the mechanisms documented on the OpenTelemetry website. EDOT Python is typically configured with OTEL_* environment variables defined by the OpenTelemetry spec. For example:

		export OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES=service.name=<app-name>
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=https://my-deployment.ingest.us-west1.gcp.cloud.es.io
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS="Authorization=ApiKey P....l"
opentelemetry-instrument <command to start your service>

	

Configuration options

Because the Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry Python is an extension of OpenTelemetry Python, it supports both:

General OpenTelemetry configuration options
Specific configuration options that are only available in EDOT Python

OpenTelemetry configuration options

EDOT Python supports all configuration options listed in the OpenTelemetry General SDK Configuration documentation and OpenTelemetry Python.

Logs

Instrument Python logging module to format and forward logs in OTLP format is turned off by default and gated under a configuration environment variable:

export OTEL_PYTHON_LOGGING_AUTO_INSTRUMENTATION_ENABLED=true

Note

Turning this on will make any call to logging.basicConfig from your application a no-op.

Differences from OpenTelemetry Python

EDOT Python uses different defaults than OpenTelemetry Python for the following configuration options:

Option	EDOT Python default	OpenTelemetry Python default
`OTEL_EXPERIMENTAL_RESOURCE_DETECTORS`	`process_runtime,os,otel,telemetry_distro,service_instance,_gcp,aws_ec2,aws_ecs,aws_elastic_beanstalk,azure_app_service,azure_vm`	`otel`
`OTEL_METRICS_EXEMPLAR_FILTER`	`always_off`	`trace_based`
`OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_METRICS_TEMPORALITY_PREFERENCE`	`DELTA`	`CUMULATIVE`

Note

OTEL_EXPERIMENTAL_RESOURCE_DETECTORS cloud resource detectors are dynamically set. When running in a Kubernetes Pod it will be set to process_runtime,os,otel,telemetry_distro,service_instance,_gcp,aws_eks.

Configuration options only available in EDOT Python

ELASTIC_OTEL_ options are specific to Elastic and will always live in EDOT Python include the following.

Option(s)	Default	Description
`ELASTIC_OTEL_SYSTEM_METRICS_ENABLED`	`false`	When sets to `true`, sends system namespace metrics.

LLM settings

LLM instrumentations implement the following configuration options:

Option	default	description
`OTEL_INSTRUMENTATION_GENAI_CAPTURE_MESSAGE_CONTENT`	`false`	If set to `true`, enables the capturing of request and response content in the log events outputted by the agent.