---
id: opentelemetry-exporter-gcp-trace
version: "1.14.0"
license: Apache-2.0
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: active
---

# opentelemetry-exporter-gcp-trace — Google Cloud Trace exporter for OpenTelemetry

License: permissive · Maintenance: active · Downloads: 11.9M/mo

## What it is and what it does

This package provides an OpenTelemetry exporter that sends trace spans to Google Cloud Trace, enabling distributed tracing and observability for applications running on or integrated with Google Cloud Platform. It acts as a bridge between OpenTelemetry's instrumentation framework and GCP's native tracing backend, allowing you to collect, visualize, and analyze request flows across microservices.

The package is marked as deprecated in favor of native OTLP (OpenTelemetry Protocol) ingestion, which Google Cloud now supports directly. However, it remains actively maintained and functional. It depends on google-cloud-trace for the underlying GCP integration, opentelemetry-api and opentelemetry-sdk for the tracing framework, opentelemetry-resourcedetector-gcp for GCP resource detection, and typing-extensions for type hints. Python 3.9 or later is required.

Use it for:

- Send distributed traces from a Python microservice to Google Cloud Trace for centralized observability.
- Instrument a multi-service application running on GCP and correlate requests across service boundaries.
- Export OpenTelemetry spans collected from your application to Cloud Trace for performance analysis and debugging.
- Integrate existing OpenTelemetry instrumentation with GCP's native tracing backend without rewriting instrumentation code.
- Monitor latency and errors in cloud-native applications by exporting detailed trace data to Cloud Trace.

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

Exports OpenTelemetry traces to Google Cloud Trace for distributed tracing and observability in GCP environments.

Yes, with conditions. The package is actively maintained and low-friction to install, but it is explicitly deprecated in favor of native OTLP exporters. Install it if you are already committed to this exporter or migrating gradually; for new projects, consider using standard OTLP exporters instead per the migration guide. No known security vulnerabilities.

## Install

pip install opentelemetry-exporter-gcp-trace
uv add opentelemetry-exporter-gcp-trace
poetry add opentelemetry-exporter-gcp-trace

## Installing opentelemetry-exporter-gcp-trace

Before you install: Low friction install with active maintenance—released 11 days ago and last commit on 2026-08-12. Depends on google-cloud-trace, opentelemetry-api, opentelemetry-sdk, opentelemetry-resourcedetector-gcp, and typing-extensions.

License in practice: Apache-2.0 permissive license allows use in most commercial and open-source projects without significant restrictions.

Quickstart:

pip install opentelemetry-exporter-gcp-trace

from opentelemetry import trace
from opentelemetry.exporter.cloud_trace import CloudTraceSpanExporter
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace import TracerProvider
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace.export import SimpleSpanProcessor

trace.set_tracer_provider(TracerProvider())
cloud_trace_exporter = CloudTraceSpanExporter(project_id='my-gcloud-project')
trace.get_tracer_provider().add_span_processor(SimpleSpanProcessor(cloud_trace_exporter))
tracer = trace.get_tracer(__name__)
with tracer.start_as_current_span('foo'):
    print('Hello world!')

Requires a GCP project ID and appropriate Google Cloud credentials configured in your environment.

Verify before relying:

- Whether the deprecation warning affects long-term support or if the package will continue receiving maintenance updates.
- Performance characteristics and overhead when exporting high-volume traces to Cloud Trace.

## Package facts

- License: Apache-2.0 (permissive)
- Python support: supports_current
- Install friction: low
- Maintenance: active
- Downloads: 11.9M/month (top 5,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

opentelemetry gcp trace exporter, google cloud trace integration, distributed tracing gcp, opentelemetry cloud trace, gcp observability traces, cloud trace span exporter, opentelemetry gcp monitoring, observability, gcp-integration, distributed-tracing

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