What's the correct way to get a reference to tracer provider?

[gajus]

For context, I am using Sentry SDK v8.

I am trying to use it with @envelop/opentelemetry.

The latter requires passing an instance of the tracer, i.e.

import { useOpenTelemetry } from '@envelop/opentelemetry';
import { trace } from '@opentelemetry/api';

useOpenTelemetry(
  {
    resolvers: true,
    result: true,
    variables: true,
  },
  trace.getTracerProvider(),
);

I tried using trace from @opentelemetry/api, but I don't see see trace spans associated with Sentry traces.

CC @AbhiPrasad @mydea

Would be good to get some guidance on whether I should be using something else other than trace from @opentelemetry/api.

p.s. I wrote a blog post that might be useful to your community https://gajus.com/blog/how-to-add-sentry-tracing-to-your-node-js-app

---

UPDATE:

So it appears that the correct way is:

const { traceProvider } = getClient();

However, the types of getClient do not have traceProvider, even though it is there. This seems like an issue with TypeScript types.

---

UPDATE:

It still does not work. Spans are not added to the resulting trace.

[AbhiPrasad]

Hey @gajus - thanks a lot for writing that article. Appreciate helping us test this all out.

Using the traceProvider should work (and have the correct spans). We'll spend some time on Monday to dig into this further. This is being tracked as part of #11070

[gajus]

Related question: How do I get instance of ContextManager ?

[mydea]

What do you need this for? I don't think there is an OpenTelemetry API to access this.

[mydea]

Hello!

So if you need the tracer, you should be able to just do getClient().tracer (or to be type safe, I think this should work: getClient<NodeClient>()?.tracer. This is the tracer we use internally as well.

However, my understanding of OpenTelemetry would have been that it should also work using any other tracer 🤔

If you are still not getting traces, could you share your Sentry.init() config - did you set a sample rate? All opentelemetry spans will be sampled through the sentry sampler, which uses the tracesSampleRate.

[mydea]

We have just shipped improved docs on these topics, you can find more info on this here: https://docs.sentry.io/platforms/javascript/guides/node/opentelemetry/using-opentelemetry-apis/#modifying-the-default-opentelemetry-tracerprovider

(Note: If you have a typescript conflict with getClient, you can do getClient<NodeClient>() to ensure the client is properly typed)