Docs » Supported integrations in Splunk Observability Cloud » Instrument back-end applications to send spans to Splunk APM » Instrument Node.js applications for Splunk Observability Cloud » About the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry JS

About the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry JS 🔗

The Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry JS is a wrapper for the OpenTelemetry Instrumentation for Node.js, an open source Node.js framework that automatically instruments Node.js applications and libraries so that they capture telemetry data at runtime.

You can automatically instrument any application written in Node.js 14 and higher. See Splunk OTel JS compatibility and requirements. To instrument applications that use Node.js versions lower than 14, use the SignalFx Tracing Library for Node.js .

Features of the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry JS 🔗

In addition to the features of the OpenTelemetry Instrumentation for Node.js, like bundled exporters and propagators, the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry JS provides additional custom features:

The Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry JS is supported by Splunk and is updated frequently, bringing bug fixes and new features to you before they are integrated in the upstream OTel repositories. See Upstream in the Splexicon .

Caution

Use the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry JS instead of the upstream OpenTelemetry JavaScript Client. Splunk supports only upstream OTel components as part of the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry JS.

Defaults of the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry JS 🔗

The Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry JS has the following default settings for context propagation, exporters, and trace settings:

Support for previous versions 🔗

Splunk is committed to supporting all customers who use this distribution. All major versions of Splunk OpenTelemetry distributions receive critical patches for one year after the next major release. Splunk stops feature development on a major release after it introduces the next major release.

For more information on versioning of the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry JS, see the release guidelines on GitHub.

How to contribute 🔗

The Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry JS is open-source software. You can contribute to its improvement by creating pull requests in GitHub. To learn more, see the contributing guidelines on GitHub.