OpenTelemetry Adapter

Rabbit Relay provides an OpenTelemetry lifecycle adapter.

The adapter listens to lifecycle hooks and creates spans for operational events.

---

Design

Rabbit Relay does not force OpenTelemetry as a runtime dependency.

Your application owns OpenTelemetry setup and passes a tracer to Rabbit Relay.

import { RabbitMQBroker, attachOpenTelemetry } from "@bitspacerlabs/rabbit-relay";
import { trace } from "@opentelemetry/api";

const broker = new RabbitMQBroker("orders-service");

const otel = attachOpenTelemetry(broker, {
  tracer: trace.getTracer("rabbit-relay"),
  serviceName: "orders-service",
});

---

Detach

attachOpenTelemetry() returns a detach handle.

otel.detach();

This removes registered lifecycle listeners.

---

Events traced

The adapter listens to:

• reconnect
• topology.asserted
• consumer.started
• consumer.stopped
• publish.failed
• retry.scheduled
• broker.closed

---

Disable specific events

attachOpenTelemetry(broker, {
  tracer: trace.getTracer("rabbit-relay"),
  disabledEvents: ["broker.closed"],
});

---

Custom span prefix

Default span names use:

rabbit-relay.<event>

Example:

rabbit-relay.consumer.started

You can change the prefix:

attachOpenTelemetry(broker, {
  tracer: trace.getTracer("rabbit-relay"),
  spanPrefix: "messaging.rabbit-relay",
});

---

Attributes

Spans include useful attributes such as:

messaging.system = rabbitmq
rabbit-relay.lifecycle.event
rabbit-relay.peer
messaging.destination.name
messaging.rabbitmq.queue
messaging.rabbitmq.routing_key
rabbit-relay.retry.count
rabbit-relay.retry.delay_ms

---

Publish failures

For publish.failed, the adapter records the exception and marks the span as error.

---

Retry scheduled

For retry.scheduled, the adapter records retry details and attaches the original handler error as span information.

---

Example

const broker = new RabbitMQBroker("payments-service");

attachOpenTelemetry(broker, {
  tracer: trace.getTracer("rabbit-relay"),
  serviceName: "payments-service",
});

broker.on("retry.scheduled", (event) => {
  console.log("retry scheduled", event);
});

You can use lifecycle hooks and OpenTelemetry together.

---

Summary

• OpenTelemetry is optional
• You pass your own tracer
• Rabbit Relay maps lifecycle events to spans
• Adapter can be detached
• Core package stays lightweight