opentelemetry-instrumentation-asyncio

What it is and what it does

This package integrates OpenTelemetry tracing into Python asyncio applications, allowing you to observe the execution of coroutines, futures, and thread-offloaded work. It wraps asyncio primitives to emit traces and metrics (duration and count) for instrumented operations, helping you diagnose performance issues and understand execution flow in async systems.

You control what gets traced via environment variables: set OTEL_PYTHON_ASYNCIO_COROUTINE_NAMES_TO_TRACE to name specific coroutines to trace, OTEL_PYTHON_ASYNCIO_TO_THREAD_FUNCTION_NAMES_TO_TRACE for blocking functions run via asyncio.to_thread, and OTEL_PYTHON_ASYNCIO_FUTURE_TRACE_ENABLED to enable future tracing. The instrumentation runs as a one-line setup call after import, making it straightforward to add to existing asyncio code.

Use it for:

• Trace execution of named coroutines in a microservice to identify slow async operations.
• Monitor duration and count metrics for asyncio processes to detect performance regressions.
• Instrument blocking functions offloaded to threads via asyncio.to_thread for end-to-end visibility.
• Integrate asyncio tracing into a distributed tracing system (e.g., Jaeger, Datadog) via OpenTelemetry exporters.
• Debug concurrency issues by correlating coroutine traces with other instrumented services.

Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying

Adds distributed tracing and metrics to asyncio applications by instrumenting coroutines, futures, and thread-offloaded functions with OpenTelemetry.

Yes, if you are building or operating asyncio applications and need observability. Low install friction, active maintenance, permissive license, and no known vulnerabilities make it a safe choice. Beta status is typical for OpenTelemetry instrumentation packages and does not indicate instability. Install if you have an OpenTelemetry backend or exporter already in place or planned.

Install

opentelemetry-instrumentation-asyncio on PyPI

pip install opentelemetry-instrumentation-asyncio

uv add opentelemetry-instrumentation-asyncio

poetry add opentelemetry-instrumentation-asyncio

Installing opentelemetry-instrumentation-asyncio

Before you install

Low friction install with a small, stable dependency tree. Actively maintained as of 2026-08-14 with recent releases; marked Beta but supported on modern Python versions (3.10–3.14).

License in practice

Apache-2.0 permissive license allows commercial and private use without restriction.

Quickstart

pip install opentelemetry-instrumentation-asyncio

import asyncio
from opentelemetry.instrumentation.asyncio import AsyncioInstrumentor

AsyncioInstrumentor().instrument()

async def main():
    await asyncio.sleep(0.1)

asyncio.run(main())

Requires Python 3.10 or later. Tracing specific coroutines requires setting OTEL_PYTHON_ASYNCIO_COROUTINE_NAMES_TO_TRACE environment variable.

Verify before relying

• Whether metrics are emitted to a backend automatically or require separate exporter configuration.
• Performance overhead of instrumentation on high-concurrency asyncio workloads.
• Compatibility with third-party asyncio frameworks (e.g., aiohttp, FastAPI) beyond core asyncio.

Package facts

Evidence: opentelemetry_instrumentation_asyncio-0.65b0-py3-none-any.whl

Tags

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