instrument an application without any code changes

[davexroth]

It should be possible to instrument a python application without any code modifications to the python code.

[rcbjBlueMars]

I've spent two nights trying to get the most basic example in the readme to work. It doesn't seem to do anything.. There are dozens of contradictory blog posts in the first 20 pages of google search results. I've tried with several different 3.x versions of python. There are also dozens of issues reported with it in the opentelemetry-python issues list. None of those that I have read seem relevent--most involve some type of error being printed--I'm getting nothing. I've enabled otel debug logging via environment variable--nothing is printed. I did find one useful google search result that noted that opentelemetry-instrument won't work with flask in debug mode. I have disabled flask debug mode. It still didn't work. I have also tried running it from a simple tox environment and from a fresh linux VM. It still does nothing. Tomorrow night, I will hook up a debugger to it and step through it line-by-line and see if I can find out where things are going wrong.

Per @davexroth, we are moving this ticket down in priority.