Troubleshoot OpenTelemetry issues in Python

  • Article

This article discusses how to troubleshoot OpenTelemetry issues in Python.

Troubleshooting checklist

Step 1: Enable diagnostic logging

The Microsoft Azure Monitor Exporter uses the Python standard logging library for its internal logging. OpenTelemetry API and Azure Monitor Exporter logs are assigned a severity level of WARNING or ERROR for irregular activity. The INFO severity level is used for regular or successful activity.

By default, the Python logging library sets the severity level to WARNING. Therefore, you must change the severity level to see logs under this severity setting. The following example code shows how to output logs of all severity levels to the console and a file:

...
import logging

logging.basicConfig(format = "%(asctime)s:%(levelname)s:%(message)s", level = logging.DEBUG)

logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)
file = logging.FileHandler("example.log")
stream = logging.StreamHandler()
logger.addHandler(file)
logger.addHandler(stream)
...

Step 2: Test connectivity between your application host and the ingestion service

Application Insights SDKs and agents send telemetry to get ingested as REST calls at our ingestion endpoints. To test connectivity from your web server or application host computer to the ingestion service endpoints, use cURL commands or raw REST requests from PowerShell. For more information, see Troubleshoot missing application telemetry in Azure Monitor Application Insights.

Step 3: Avoid duplicate telemetry

Duplicate telemetry is often caused if you create multiple instances of processors or exporters. Make sure that you run only one exporter and processor at a time for each telemetry pillar (logs, metrics, and distributed tracing).

The following sections describe scenarios that can cause duplicate telemetry.

Duplicate trace logs in Azure Functions

If you see a pair of entries for each trace log within Application Insights, you probably enabled the following types of logging instrumentation:

  • The native logging instrumentation in Azure Functions
  • The azure-monitor-opentelemetry logging instrumentation within the distribution

To prevent duplication, you can disable the distribution's logging, but leave the native logging instrumentation in Azure Functions enabled. To do this, set the OTEL_LOGS_EXPORTER environment variable to None.

Duplicate telemetry in "Always On" Azure Functions

If the Always On setting in Azure Functions is set to On, Azure Functions keeps some processes running in the background after each run is complete. For instance, suppose that you have a five-minute timer function that calls configure_azure_monitor each time. After 20 minutes, you then might have four metric exporters that are running at the same time. This situation might be the source of your duplicate metrics telemetry.

In this situation, either set the Always On setting to Off, or try manually shutting down the providers between each configure_azure_monitor call. To shut down each provider, run shutdown calls for each current meter, tracer, and logger provider, as shown in the following code:

get_meter_provider().shutdown()
get_tracer_provider().shutdown()
get_logger_provider().shutdown()

Azure Workbooks and Jupyter Notebooks

Azure Workbooks and Jupyter Notebooks might keep exporter processes running in the background. To prevent duplicate telemetry, clear the cache before you make more calls to configure_azure_monitor.

Step 4: Make sure that Flask request data is collected

If you implement a Flask application, you might find that you can't collect Requests table data from Application Insights while you use the Azure Monitor OpenTelemetry Distro client library for Python. This issue could occur if you don't structure your import declarations correctly. You might be importing the flask.Flask web application framework before you call the configure_azure_monitor function to instrument the Flask library. For example, the following code doesn't successfully instrument the Flask app:

from azure.monitor.opentelemetry import configure_azure_monitor
from flask import Flask

configure_azure_monitor()

app = Flask(__name__)

Instead, we recommend that you import the flask module as a whole, and then call configure_azure_monitor to configure OpenTelemetry to use Azure Monitor before you access flask.Flask:

from azure.monitor.opentelemetry import configure_azure_monitor
import flask

configure_azure_monitor()

app = flask.Flask(__name__)

Alternatively, you can call configure_azure_monitor before you import flask.Flask:

from azure.monitor.opentelemetry import configure_azure_monitor

configure_azure_monitor()

from flask import Flask

app = Flask(__name__)

Contact us for help

If you have questions or need help, create a support request, or ask Azure community support. You can also submit product feedback to Azure feedback community.