arize-phoenix-otel

Provides a lightweight wrapper around OpenTelemetry primitives with Phoenix-aware defaults. Phoenix Otel also gives you acces to tracing decorators for common GenAI patterns.

These defaults are aware of environment variables you may have set to configure Phoenix:

• PHOENIX_COLLECTOR_ENDPOINT

• PHOENIX_PROJECT_NAME

• PHOENIX_CLIENT_HEADERS

• PHOENIX_API_KEY

• PHOENIX_GRPC_PORT

Installation

Install via pip.

pip install -Uq arize-phoenix-otel

Examples

The phoenix.otel module provides a high-level register function to configure OpenTelemetry tracing by setting a global TracerProvider. The register function can also configure headers and whether or not to process spans one by one or by batch.

Quickstart

from phoenix.otel import register
tracer_provider = register()

This is all you need to get started using OTel with Phoenix! register defaults to sending spans to an endpoint at http://localhost using gRPC.

Phoenix Authentication

If the PHOENIX_API_KEY environment variable is set, register will automatically add anauthorization header to each span payload.

Configuring the collector endpoint

There are two ways to configure the collector endpoint:

• Using environment variables

• Using the endpoint keyword argument

Using environment variables

If you're setting the PHOENIX_COLLECTOR_ENDPOINT environment variable, register will automatically try to send spans to your Phoenix server using gRPC.

# export PHOENIX_COLLECTOR_ENDPOINT=https://your-phoenix.com:6006

from phoenix.otel import register
tracer_provider = register()

Specifying the endpoint directly

When passing in the endpoint argument, you must specify the fully qualified endpoint. For example, in order to export spans via HTTP to localhost, use Phoenix's HTTP collector endpoint:http://localhost:6006/v1/traces. The default gRPC endpoint is different: http://localhost:4317. If the PHOENIX_GRPC_PORT environment variable is set, it will override the default gRPC port.

from phoenix.otel import register
tracer_provider = register(endpoint="http://localhost:6006/v1/traces")

Additionally, the protocol argument can be used to enforce the OTLP transport protocol regardless of the endpoint specified. This might be useful in cases such as when the GRPC endpoint is bound to a different port than the default (4317). The valid protocols are: "http/protobuf", and "grpc".

from phoenix.otel import register
tracer_provider = register(endpoint="http://localhost:9999", protocol="grpc")

Additional configuration

register can be configured with different keyword arguments:

• project_name: The Phoenix project name (or PHOENIX_PROJECT_NAME env. var)

• headers: Headers to send along with each span payload (or PHOENIX_CLIENT_HEADERS env. var)

• batch: Whether or not to process spans in batch

from phoenix.otel import register
tracer_provider = register(
    project_name="otel-test", headers={"Authorization": "Bearer TOKEN"}, batch=True
)

A drop-in replacement for OTel primitives

For more granular tracing configuration, these wrappers can be used as drop-in replacements for OTel primitives:

from opentelemetry import trace as trace_api
from phoenix.otel import HTTPSpanExporter, TracerProvider, SimpleSpanProcessor

tracer_provider = TracerProvider()
span_exporter = HTTPSpanExporter(endpoint="http://localhost:6006/v1/traces")
span_processor = SimpleSpanProcessor(span_exporter=span_exporter)
tracer_provider.add_span_processor(span_processor)
trace_api.set_tracer_provider(tracer_provider)

Wrappers have Phoenix-aware defaults to greatly simplify the OTel configuration process. A specialendpoint keyword argument can be passed to either a TracerProvider, SimpleSpanProcessor orBatchSpanProcessor in order to automatically infer which SpanExporter to use to simplify setup.

Using environment variables

# export PHOENIX_COLLECTOR_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:6006

from opentelemetry import trace as trace_api
from phoenix.otel import TracerProvider

tracer_provider = TracerProvider()
trace_api.set_tracer_provider(tracer_provider)

Specifying the endpoint directly

from opentelemetry import trace as trace_api
from phoenix.otel import TracerProvider

tracer_provider = TracerProvider(endpoint="http://localhost:4317")
trace_api.set_tracer_provider(tracer_provider)

Further examples

Users can gradually add OTel components as desired:

Configuring resources

# export PHOENIX_COLLECTOR_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:6006

from opentelemetry import trace as trace_api
from phoenix.otel import Resource, PROJECT_NAME, TracerProvider

tracer_provider = TracerProvider(resource=Resource({PROJECT_NAME: "my-project"}))
trace_api.set_tracer_provider(tracer_provider)

Using a BatchSpanProcessor

# export PHOENIX_COLLECTOR_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:6006

from opentelemetry import trace as trace_api
from phoenix.otel import TracerProvider, BatchSpanProcessor

tracer_provider = TracerProvider()
batch_processor = BatchSpanProcessor()
tracer_provider.add_span_processor(batch_processor)

Specifying a custom GRPC endpoint

from opentelemetry import trace as trace_api
from phoenix.otel import TracerProvider, BatchSpanProcessor, GRPCSpanExporter

tracer_provider = TracerProvider()
batch_processor = BatchSpanProcessor(
    span_exporter=GRPCSpanExporter(endpoint="http://custom-endpoint.com:6789")
)
tracer_provider.add_span_processor(batch_processor)

Passing TracerProvider kwargs

Both register() and TracerProvider accept all the same keyword arguments as the standard OpenTelemetry TracerProvider, allowing you to configure advanced features like custom ID generators, sampling, and span limits.

from opentelemetry.sdk.extension.aws.trace import AwsXRayIdGenerator
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace.sampling import TraceIdRatioBased
from phoenix.otel import register, TracerProvider

# Configure directly with register()
tracer_provider = register(
    project_name="my-app",
    id_generator=AwsXRayIdGenerator(),  # AWS X-Ray compatible IDs
    sampler=TraceIdRatioBased(0.1),     # Sample 10% of traces
)

# Or configure TracerProvider directly
tracer_provider = TracerProvider(
    project_name="my-app",
    id_generator=AwsXRayIdGenerator(),
    sampler=TraceIdRatioBased(0.5)
)