OTLP Export¶

Autobench can replay an immutable experiment record into OTLP HTTP/protobuf traces for systems such as Logfire, Datadog, or a vendor-neutral OpenTelemetry Collector. This is an outbound adapter, not Autobench's collection protocol:

application -> ABP instrumentation -> immutable Autobench record -> optional OTLP export

ABP remains the complete source of truth for semantic observations, benchmark identity, partial execution, behavioral assets, and replay. Export never converts a record back into application calls and never mutates the source directory.

Install The Exporter¶

The base package does not import or install OpenTelemetry. Add the dedicated extra only on a worker that exports records:

uv add 'autobench[otlp]'

python -m pip install 'autobench[otlp]'

This installs the OpenTelemetry SDK and HTTP/protobuf trace exporter. It does not replace ABP instrumentors and does not enable OTel-to-ABP ingestion.

Export From The CLI¶

Point the command at a completed or explicitly partial Autobench record:

autobench telemetry export runs/routing-42 \
  --endpoint https://collector.example/v1/traces \
  --header authorization 'Bearer ...' \
  --service-name routing-benchmark \
  --service-namespace evaluation

When --endpoint and --header are omitted, the underlying exporter can use standard OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_ENDPOINT and OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS configuration. Credentials belong in environment variables or CLI secret injection, never in a benchmark YAML file.

Useful options:

The command prints a Rich summary containing experiment and benchmark identity, record version, run/trace/span counts, partial counts, and the selected endpoint. Export failures return a nonzero exit status and leave the record unchanged.

Export From Python¶

from pathlib import Path

from autobench import OTLPSettings, export_record_otlp

result = export_record_otlp(
    Path("runs/routing-42"),
    settings=OTLPSettings(
        endpoint="https://collector.example/v1/traces",
        headers={"authorization": "Bearer ..."},
        timeout_seconds=10,
        service_name="routing-benchmark",
        service_namespace="evaluation",
        resource_attributes={"deployment.environment": "staging"},
    ),
)

print(result.exported_span_count)

export_otlp(experiment, runs, ...) accepts already loaded ExperimentRecord and RunRecord models. It validates run count, unique run IDs, benchmark and experiment ownership, and execution correlation before mapping anything. Tests and custom delivery layers may inject an OTel SpanExporter; Autobench does not shut down an exporter it does not own.

Evidence Mapping¶

One export creates this hierarchy:

autobench.experiment <benchmark_id>
  autobench.run <case_id> / <variant_id>
    autobench.trace <trace_id-prefix>
      <ABP root span>
        <ABP child span>

Historical benchmark measurements are exported as span events, not fabricated live OTLP metric streams. Their canonical semantic type, unit, direction, role, and source remain in the event, so a consumer can project them deliberately without confusing replay time with measurement time.

The exporter preserves experiment, benchmark, run, case, variant, record-version, ABP trace/span, dataset, spec hash, manifest, correlation, instrumentation scope, package version, source-map, and source-convention identities where available. Reserved Autobench resource identities cannot be overridden through custom resource attributes.

Partial And Cancelled Records¶

Completed, cancelled, aborted, and recovered partial records are all exportable. Experiment and run spans retain terminal status, partial, end reason, planned/recorded/missing run IDs, and whether cross-run derivation and policy evaluation completed. An open or partial ABP trace is marked as partial rather than being represented as a successful complete trace.

OTLP export is reporting, not recovery. Use autobench recording inspect and autobench recording finalize --allow-partial to publish recoverable staging evidence first.

Content And Privacy¶

By default, export keeps structural and semantic evidence while omitting captured content:

• event bodies and ABP span outputs;
• score actual/expected values;
• non-metric observation values;
• retained source-fact values;
• tracebacks.

References, hashes, counts, semantic types, status, usage, asset IDs/versions, and provenance remain available. --include-captured-content or OTLPSettings(include_captured_content=True) includes content that ABP already captured. It cannot recover content excluded or redacted by the original capture policy. Treat this switch as a deliberate data-export decision.

Failure Boundary¶

Mapping, network export, exporter rejection, and owned-exporter shutdown failures raise OTLPExportError. The original Pydantic record models and files are never changed. An injected exporter remains caller-owned and is not shut down. This allows export retries or delivery to several telemetry systems without changing benchmark evidence or replay lineage.

What This Adapter Does Not Do¶

• It does not make OTel an Autobench runtime dependency.
• It does not ingest arbitrary OTel traces into ABP.
• It does not patch application SDKs through OTel instrumentations.
• It does not use OTLP as benchmark persistence.
• It does not add vendor configuration to BenchmarkSpec.

Use Native Instrumentation to collect automatic application evidence into ABP, then use this adapter when the resulting record also needs to appear in an OTLP backend.