# Get Started with OpenTelemetry

Opik provides native support for OpenTelemetry (OTel), allowing you to instrument
your ML/AI applications with distributed tracing. This guide will show you how
to directly integrate OpenTelemetry SDKs with Opik.

<Note>
  OpenTelemetry integration in Opik currently supports HTTP transport. We're actively working on expanding the feature
  set - stay tuned for updates!
</Note>

## OpenTelemetry Endpoint Configuration

### Base Endpoint

To start sending traces to Opik, configure your OpenTelemetry exporter with one of these endpoints:

<Tabs>
  <Tab title="Opik Cloud">
    ```bash wordWrap
    export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT="https://www.comet.com/opik/api/v1/private/otel"
    export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS="Authorization=<your-api-key>,projectName=<your-project-name>,Comet-Workspace=<your-workspace-name>"
    ```
  </Tab>

  <Tab title="Self-hosted deployment">
    ```bash wordWrap
    export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT="http://localhost:5173/api/v1/private/otel"
    ```
  </Tab>

  <Tab title="Enterprise deployment">
    ```bash wordWrap
    export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT="https://<comet deployment url>/opik/api/v1/private/otel"
    export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS="Authorization=<your-api-key>,projectName=<your-project-name>,Comet-Workspace=<your-workspace-name>"
    ```
  </Tab>
</Tabs>

### Signal-Specific Endpoint

If your OpenTelemetry setup requires signal-specific configuration, you can use
the traces endpoint. This is particularly useful when different signals (traces,
metrics, logs) need to be sent to different endpoints:

```bash wordWrap
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_ENDPOINT="http://<YOUR-OPIK-INSTANCE>/api/v1/private/otel/v1/traces"
```

## Custom via OpenTelemetry SDKs

You can use any OpenTelemetry SDK to send traces directly to Opik. OpenTelemetry
provides SDKs for many languages (C++, .NET, Erlang/Elixir, Go, Java, JavaScript,
PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, Swift). This extends Opik's language support beyond the
official SDKs (Python and TypeScript). For more instructions, visit the
[OpenTelemetry documentation](https://opentelemetry.io/docs/languages/).

Here's a Python example showing how to set up OpenTelemetry with Opik:

```python wordWrap
from opentelemetry import trace
from opentelemetry.exporter.otlp.proto.http.trace_exporter import (
    OTLPSpanExporter
)
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace import TracerProvider
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace.export import BatchSpanProcessor