OpenTelemetry Integration

The NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails library follows OpenTelemetry best practices. The library uses only the API, and the host application configures the SDK. The following sections explain how to install and configure the OpenTelemetry SDK.

Installation

Choose one of the following options for installing the library with tracing support, the OpenTelemetry SDK, and the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) exporter.

• For basic tracing support in the NeMo Guardrails library:

  pip install nemoguardrails[tracing]
  

• For development with the OpenTelemetry SDK:

  pip install nemoguardrails[tracing] opentelemetry-sdk
  

• For production with the OpenTelemetry SDK and the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) exporter:

  pip install nemoguardrails[tracing] opentelemetry-sdk opentelemetry-exporter-otlp
  

Configuration Examples

The following examples show how to configure the library with the OpenTelemetry SDK for development and production use cases.

Console Output (Development)

from opentelemetry import trace
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace import TracerProvider
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace.export import BatchSpanProcessor, ConsoleSpanExporter
from opentelemetry.sdk.resources import Resource

# Configure OpenTelemetry before NeMo Guardrails
resource = Resource.create({"service.name": "my-guardrails-app"})
tracer_provider = TracerProvider(resource=resource)
trace.set_tracer_provider(tracer_provider)

console_exporter = ConsoleSpanExporter()
tracer_provider.add_span_processor(BatchSpanProcessor(console_exporter))

# Configure NeMo Guardrails
from nemoguardrails import LLMRails, RailsConfig

config_yaml = """
models:
  - type: main
    engine: openai
    model: gpt-4o-mini

tracing:
  enabled: true
  adapters:
    - name: OpenTelemetry
"""

config = RailsConfig.from_content(yaml_content=config_yaml)

rails = LLMRails(config)

OTLP Exporter (Production)

from opentelemetry import trace
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace import TracerProvider
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace.export import BatchSpanProcessor
from opentelemetry.exporter.otlp.proto.grpc.trace_exporter import OTLPSpanExporter
from opentelemetry.sdk.resources import Resource

resource = Resource.create({"service.name": "my-guardrails-app"})
tracer_provider = TracerProvider(resource=resource)
trace.set_tracer_provider(tracer_provider)

otlp_exporter = OTLPSpanExporter(endpoint="http://localhost:4317", insecure=True)
tracer_provider.add_span_processor(BatchSpanProcessor(otlp_exporter))

# Use with NeMo Guardrails as above

OpenTelemetry Ecosystem Compatibility

The library works with the entire OpenTelemetry ecosystem, including the following components.

Component	Examples
Exporters	Jaeger, Zipkin, Prometheus, New Relic, Datadog, AWS X-Ray, and Google Cloud Trace.
Collectors	OpenTelemetry Collector and vendor-specific collectors.
Backends	Any system that accepts OpenTelemetry traces.

Refer to the OpenTelemetry Registry for the complete list.

Exporting Logs

To also forward guardrails Python log records into your OpenTelemetry backend with trace correlation, see Exporting Guardrails Logs to OpenTelemetry.