---
title: Observability via OpenTelemetry
description: You can use OpenTelemetry for observability into the Langfuse application.
sidebarTitle: "Observability"
---

# Observability via OpenTelemetry

Langfuse uses OpenTelemetry to provide observability into the application.
If you want to include Langfuse into your own tracing setup, you can configure the following environment variables to send spans to your own collector:

| Variable                      | Required / Default      | Description                                                                                       |
| ----------------------------- | ----------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| `OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT` | `http://localhost:4318` | The OTLP collector endpoint Langfuse should send traces to. Path is /v1/traces.                   |
| `OTEL_SERVICE_NAME`           | `web/worker`            | Name of the service within your APM tool.                                                         |
| `OTEL_TRACE_SAMPLING_RATIO`   | `1`                     | The sampling ratio for traces. A value of `1` means all traces are sent. Must be between 0 and 1. |

---

If you experience any issues when self-hosting Langfuse, please:

1. Check out [Troubleshooting & FAQ](/self-hosting/troubleshooting-and-faq) page.
2. Use [Ask AI](/ask-ai) to get instant answers to your questions.
3. Ask the maintainers on [GitHub Discussions](/gh-support).
4. Create a bug report or feature request on [GitHub](/issues).

  Enterprise-grade support is available when self-hosting Langfuse. Learn more on
  our [pricing page](/pricing-self-host).

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---

## Agent Instructions

This page is part of the [Langfuse](https://langfuse.com) documentation, published as plain Markdown for AI agents. Every page is available as Markdown by appending `.md` to its URL, or by sending an `Accept: text/markdown` header. This page: `https://langfuse.com/self-hosting/configuration/observability.md`.

### Querying these docs

If the answer is not on this page, query the documentation instead of guessing:

- **Semantic search** across all Langfuse docs, returning an answer with the relevant pages and excerpts. Ask a specific, self-contained question:

  ```bash
  curl -sG "https://langfuse.com/api/search-docs" --data-urlencode "query=How do I trace a LangGraph agent?"
  ```

- **Index of every page**: <https://langfuse.com/llms.txt>, with per-section indexes [llms-docs.txt](https://langfuse.com/llms-docs.txt), [llms-integrations.txt](https://langfuse.com/llms-integrations.txt), and [llms-self-hosting.txt](https://langfuse.com/llms-self-hosting.txt).

### Before writing Langfuse code

- **Install the [Langfuse Agent Skill](https://langfuse.com/docs/api-and-data-platform/features/agent-skill).** It encodes Langfuse's own best practices for instrumentation, prompt management, and evaluation, and materially improves results.
- **Read [What does a good trace look like?](https://langfuse.com/docs/observability/best-practices.md)** before instrumenting an application.
- **Verify endpoints, parameters, and response fields** against the [API reference](https://api.reference.langfuse.com) instead of inferring them from code examples.
- **Use the [Langfuse CLI](https://langfuse.com/docs/api-and-data-platform/features/cli)** (`npx langfuse-cli api <resource> <action>`) to read or write traces, prompts, datasets, and scores from the terminal.

Found an error in these docs? Please open an issue at <https://github.com/langfuse/langfuse-docs/issues>.