otel-instrumentation

otel-instrumentation is a skill for Claude Code from honeycombio/agent-skill. It costs 119 tokens per session (4,192 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

Guidance for adding OpenTelemetry, an open standard for collecting traces and other service data, to an application and sending it to Honeycomb.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to instrument an app, add custom spans and attributes, configure OTLP, set sampling, and send traces or metrics to Honeycomb.
Why use it?
It helps remove guesswork from setting up the SDK and configuring data export. It also explains how to add useful details to traces and control sampling.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT} variable.

Runs only inside its plugin — its command needs a path that Claude Code sets for a plugin’s own hooks and for nothing else. Install the plugin, not this.

Part of the honeycomb plugin — 11 skills, 1 command, 2 agents, 2 hooks shipped together

Good fit Use it to instrument an app, add custom spans and attributes, configure OTLP, set sampling, and send traces or metrics to Honeycomb.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

This one installs as part of its plugin. Adding the marketplace and installing the plugin brings it with everything else the plugin ships.

Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add honeycombio/agent-skill
Claude Code
/plugin install honeycomb

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install honeycomb, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 11 skills, 1 command, 2 agents, 2 hooks.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for otel-instrumentation

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/honeycombio/agent-skill/otel-instrumentation/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/honeycombio/agent-skill/otel-instrumentation)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/honeycombio/agent-skill/otel-instrumentation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/honeycombio/agent-skill/otel-instrumentation/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for otel-instrumentation

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/honeycombio/agent-skill/otel-instrumentation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/honeycombio/agent-skill/otel-instrumentation.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 119 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,192 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 25 Mar 2026
  • Snyk pass 25 Mar 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00119 $0.04192
Opus 5 $0.00060 $0.02096
Sonnet 5 $0.00024 $0.00838
Haiku 4.5 $0.00012 $0.00419

Measured 10d ago against content hash 0f851e74a747, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

otel-instrumentation scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 10d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

honeycomb/skills/otel-instrumentation/SKILL.md · 355 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 355 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

OpenTelemetry Instrumentation for Honeycomb

SDK setup, custom spans, attributes, span events, sampling, and layered telemetry. For conceptual foundations (why wide events matter, how attributes connect to investigation), see the observability-fundamentals skill.

OTLP Configuration and SDK Setup

Every OTel SDK needs these environment variables to send data to Honeycomb:

Required Environment Variables

Base configuration:

OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=your-service-name
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=https://api.honeycomb.io
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS="x-honeycomb-team=YOUR_API_KEY"

Optional but recommended:

# Protocol selection (default: http/protobuf)
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL=http/protobuf  # or grpc

# Signal-specific endpoints (override base endpoint for specific signals)
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_ENDPOINT=https://api.honeycomb.io/v1/traces
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_METRICS_ENDPOINT=https://api.honeycomb.io/v1/metrics

For metrics (preferred): Use modern OTLP metrics and native datapoints. Use dataset hints to confirm the destination type (metrics or events). Authenticate with:

OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_METRICS_HEADERS="x-honeycomb-team=YOUR_API_KEY"

Protocol Selection

OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL determines the wire format and transport:

  • http/protobuf (default, recommended) — HTTP with protobuf encoding
  • grpc — gRPC with protobuf encoding
  • http/json — HTTP with JSON encoding (larger payload, slower)

Use http/protobuf unless you have specific infrastructure requirements for gRPC.

Signal-Specific Endpoints

By default, OTel SDKs append /v1/traces and /v1/metrics to OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT. Use signal-specific endpoint vars to override:

  • OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_ENDPOINT — full URL for traces (including /v1/traces)
  • OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_METRICS_ENDPOINT — full URL for metrics (including /v1/metrics)

Useful when routing signals to different backends or using non-standard endpoints.

Read the full file on GitHub · 355 lines

Files

What ships with it

8 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 10d ago First seen · 355 lines · 119 tokens per session scan A 0f851e74a747

Subscribe to this mod's changes

otel-instrumentation is a skill published in the GitHub repository honeycombio/agent-skill (22 stars, last pushed 14d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 119 tokens to every session and 4,192 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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