Overview
Instrumentation is how your app’s work reaches Logfire. You add a few lines (or attach an agent) once, and every request, database query, and error shows up as a trace (the full journey of one request, made of nested spans, where a span is one unit of work with a name, a start, and a duration). From then on you read the traces instead of adding logging by hand.
Logfire is built on OpenTelemetry (OTel), the open industry standard for collecting traces, metrics, and logs, so it works with any language OpenTelemetry supports.
These wrap OpenTelemetry in an idiomatic API for each language, with streamlined setup and extra features. Each guide takes you from install to your first trace in a few minutes:
For a language without a dedicated SDK, send data with the standard OpenTelemetry SDK. We have setup guides for:
Once your app is sending data:
- See it arrive in the Live view.
- Instrument the libraries you already use (web framework, database driver, HTTP client) with Integrations.
- New to tracing? Core concepts explains spans and traces and how to read them.