Clarification about instrumentation for non-Next.js apps and on local development environment

[chicoxyzzy]

Hello, I have a few questions about @vercel/otel usage with my own OT Collector.

I'm following the guide on https://vercel.com/docs/observability/otel-overview#quickstart-for-using-the-vercel-opentelemetry-collector

My app is an Astro app with @astrojs/vercel/serverless adapter (so it runs on Node.js runtime), which is deployed on Vercel.

I've have this code in my instrumentation.ts:

import { registerOTel, OTLPHttpProtoTraceExporter } from '@vercel/otel';


export function register() {
  registerOTel({
    serviceName: 'project-name',
    traceExporter: new OTLPHttpProtoTraceExporter({
      url: import.meta.env.OTLP_ENDPOINT,
    }),
  });
}

How can I test that instrumentation.ts is actually used and sends traces? Astro's dev mode doesn't know anything about instrumentation.ts file and it's not taken into account.
Is it possible to make it work on local development environment as well?

Do I need to activate tracing via the Vercel Dashboard or it's only necessary when I want to use Vercel's OT Collector?

[KiithNabaal]

I was trying to figure out how to get this started as well, since it didn't seem like just implementing the instrumentation file was enough. I am not developing an Astro app, but I added the following to the next.config.mjs file:

experimental: { instrumentationHook: true, }

And it looked like this started the instrumentation when I re-ran the app, although in my case I got an error message when it was trying to load lol. I was looking at their example app here: https://github.com/vercel/next.js/tree/canary/examples/with-opentelemetry