The instana package provides Python metrics and traces (request, queue & cross-host) for Instana.

This package supports Python 2.7 or greater.

Any and all feedback is welcome. Happy Python visibility.

pip install instana into the virtual-env or container (hosted on pypi)

For Django versions >= 1.10 set the following environment variable in your application boot environment and then restart your application:

export AUTOWRAPT_BOOTSTRAP=django

For Django version 1.9.x, instead set:

export AUTOWRAPT_BOOTSTRAP=django19

To enable the Flask instrumentation, set the following environment variable in your application boot environment and then restart your application:

export AUTOWRAPT_BOOTSTRAP=flask

The Instana sensor bundles with it WSGI middleware. The usage of this middleware is automated for various frameworks but for those that arent' supported yet, see the WSGI documentation for details on how to manually add it to your stack.

Note: When the Django or Flask instrumentation is used, runtime monitoring is automatically included. Use this section if you only want to see runtime metrics.

To enable runtime monitoring (without request tracing), set the following environment variable in your application boot environment and then restart your application:

export AUTOWRAPT_BOOTSTRAP=runtime

This Python instrumentation spawns a lightweight background thread to periodically collect and report process metrics. By default, the GIL and threading is disabled under uWSGI. If you wish to instrument your application running under uWSGI, make sure that you enable threads by passing --enable-threads (or enable-threads = true in ini style). More details in the uWSGI documentation.

If you use uWSGI in forking workers mode, you must specify --lazy-apps (or lazy-apps = true in ini style) to load the application in the worker instead of the master process.

uwsgi --socket 0.0.0.0:5000 --protocol=http -w wsgi -p 4 --enable-threads --lazy-apps

[uwsgi]
http = :5000
master = true
processes = 4
enable-threads = true # required
lazy-apps = true # if using "processes", set lazy-apps to true

# Set the Instana sensor environment variable here
env = AUTOWRAPT_BOOTSTRAP=flask

The instana package will automatically collect key metrics from your Python processes. Just install and go.

Instana provides deep end user monitoring that links server side traces with browser events to give you a complete view from server to browser.

For Python templates and views, get your EUM API key from your Instana dashboard and you can call instana.helpers.eum_snippet(api_key='abc') from within your layout file. This will output a small javascript snippet of code to instrument browser events. It's based on Weasel. Check it out.

As an example, you could do the following:

from instana.helpers import eum_snippet

instana.api_key = 'abc'
meta_kvs = { 'username': user.name }

# This will return a string containing the EUM javascript for the layout or view.
eum_snippet(meta=meta_kvs)

The optional second argument to eum_snippet() is a hash of metadata key/values that will be reported along with the browser instrumentation.

See also the End User Monitoring in the Instana documentation portal.

This Python package supports OpenTracing. When using this package, the OpenTracing tracer (opentracing.tracer) is automatically set to the InstanaTracer.

import opentracing

parent_span = opentracing.tracer.start_span(operation_name="asteroid")
# ... work
child_span = opentracing.tracer.start_span(operation_name="spacedust", child_of=parent_span)
child_span.set_tag(ext.SPAN_KIND, ext.SPAN_KIND_RPC_CLIENT)
# ... work
child_span.finish()
# ... work
parent_span.finish()

Note: The Instana sensor has automatic instrumentation that activates at runtime. If you need to get the current tracing context from existing instrumentation, you can use opentracing.tracer.current_context() and pass that return value as childof:

    context = opentracing.tracer.current_context()
    span = opentracing.tracer.start_span("my_span", child_of=context)

Also note that under evented systems such as gevent, concurrence and/or greenlets (which aren't supportet yet), the value opentracing.tracer.current_context() is likely to be inconsistent.

See Configuration.md

You can find more documentation covering supported components and minimum versions in the Instana documentation portal.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/instana/python-sensor.

Want to instrument other languages? See our Nodejs, Go, Ruby instrumentation or many other supported technologies.