---
id: opentelemetry-instrumentation-chromadb
version: "0.62.3"
license: Apache-2.0
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: active
---

# opentelemetry-instrumentation-chromadb — OpenTelemetry Chroma DB instrumentation

License: permissive · Maintenance: active · Downloads: 6.9M/mo

## What it is and what it does

This package is an OpenTelemetry instrumentation plugin that automatically captures tracing data from Chroma vector database client calls. It wraps the official Chroma library to emit spans compatible with OpenTelemetry's distributed tracing ecosystem, allowing you to observe and debug interactions with Chroma in production systems.

You activate it by calling `ChromaInstrumentor().instrument()` early in your application startup. Once enabled, all subsequent Chroma client operations generate traces that flow into your configured OpenTelemetry exporters (e.g., Jaeger, Datadog, or other APM backends). It depends on opentelemetry-api, opentelemetry-instrumentation, and semantic convention packages to standardize how Chroma operations are represented in traces.

Use it for:

- Debug slow or failing Chroma queries by viewing detailed traces in an APM dashboard
- Monitor vector database latency and error rates across your application in production
- Correlate Chroma operations with other service calls in a distributed system trace
- Audit which vector operations are being performed and by which code paths
- Integrate Chroma observability into existing OpenTelemetry-based monitoring infrastructure

## Worth the install?

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

Adds distributed tracing to Chroma vector database client calls using OpenTelemetry, capturing spans for observability.

Yes, if you are already using OpenTelemetry for observability and need visibility into Chroma client calls. The low install friction, active maintenance, permissive license, and zero known vulnerabilities make it a straightforward addition to tracing-enabled applications. Not necessary if you have no observability requirements or are not using OpenTelemetry.

## Install

pip install opentelemetry-instrumentation-chromadb
uv add opentelemetry-instrumentation-chromadb
poetry add opentelemetry-instrumentation-chromadb

## Installing opentelemetry-instrumentation-chromadb

Before you install: Low friction install with a small, focused dependency tree. Actively maintained as of 2026-08-10 with recent releases.

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

Quickstart:

pip install opentelemetry-instrumentation-chromadb

from opentelemetry.instrumentation.chromadb import ChromaInstrumentor

ChromaInstrumentor().instrument()

Requires Python 3.10 or later and an OpenTelemetry exporter configured to receive traces.

Verify before relying:

- Whether this package supports all Chroma API operations or only a subset of client calls
- Compatibility with Chroma versions beyond the implicit support of the instrumentation design
- Performance overhead of instrumentation on typical Chroma query workloads

## Package facts

- License: Apache-2.0 (permissive)
- Python support: supports_current
- Install friction: low
- Maintenance: active
- Downloads: 6.9M/month (top 5,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

opentelemetry chroma tracing, vector database instrumentation, chroma db observability, distributed tracing chromadb, opentelemetry vector db, chroma client tracing, telemetry chromadb calls, observability, vector-db, tracing

[View on SkillFed](https://skillfed.io/packages/opentelemetry-instrumentation-chromadb) · [View on PyPI](https://pypi.org/project/opentelemetry-instrumentation-chromadb/)