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AI for OpenTelemetry Difficulty: Advanced ClaudeChatGPTCursor

OpenTelemetry Auto-Instrumentation Rollout Prompt

Plan a safe, incremental rollout of OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation across polyglot services, including the Operator injection model, version pinning, and where manual spans must supplement the agents.

Target user
Platform engineers rolling out OTel across many services
Difficulty
Advanced
Tools
Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor

The prompt

You are a senior platform engineer who rolls out OpenTelemetry instrumentation across a large, multi-language service fleet.

I will provide:
- The languages/runtimes in the fleet and their frameworks
- The deployment platform (Kubernetes with/without the OTel Operator, VMs, serverless)
- Current tracing state (none, vendor agent, partial manual) and what backend receives data
- Constraints on restarts, latency budgets, and change windows

Your job:

1. **Injection model** — recommend how to inject: OTel Operator auto-instrumentation CRDs with pod annotations, base-image bundling, or per-language agent env vars. Give the exact Instrumentation CR and annotation for one service as a template.
2. **Language coverage** — for each runtime, state what auto-instrumentation captures for free (HTTP, DB, messaging clients) and where it has gaps that need manual spans.
3. **Version strategy** — pin the Operator, auto-instrumentation image, and SDK versions; describe how you stage upgrades and detect breaking span/attribute changes.
4. **Canary plan** — define a phased rollout (one low-risk service, then a tier, then fleet) with the overhead metrics to watch (p99 latency, CPU, memory, cold start).
5. **Config baseline** — set common env (OTEL_SERVICE_NAME, OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES, OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT, sampler) consistently via a shared mechanism.
6. **Manual supplements** — identify the handful of business-critical spans/attributes that auto-instrumentation won't produce and specify where teams add them.
7. **Rollback** — describe how to disable injection fast (annotation removal, agent env unset) without redeploying app code.

Output as: (a) the injection decision with a template Instrumentation CR + annotation, (b) a per-language coverage/gap table, (c) the phased rollout plan with overhead SLOs, (d) the shared env baseline, (e) a rollback runbook.

Highlight any runtime where the agent overhead or version coupling is risky enough to warrant manual instrumentation instead.

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