Monitor a Node.js app with Lampwick

Node.js apps send to Lampwick through OpenTelemetry. The auto-instrumentations patch http, Express, pg and more when Node starts, so your code stays as it is. We tested it with Express 5, pg and pino on Node.js 26.

What you get

• Requests, grouped by route, such as GET /orders/:id.
• Queries, linked to the request they ran in.
• Issues from unhandled errors, with the stack trace, counted once per request.
• Logs from pino, winston or bunyan, linked to their request.

Set it up

npm install @opentelemetry/api @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node

Set these in the app's environment:

export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=https://app.lampwick.dev
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL=http/protobuf
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS=x-lampwick-token=YOUR_PROJECT_TOKEN
export OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=my-app
export OTEL_METRICS_EXPORTER=none
export OTEL_LOGS_EXPORTER=otlp
export NODE_OPTIONS="--require @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node/register"

YOUR_PROJECT_TOKEN is the project's ingest token, from the Connect your app card on its Settings page. NODE_OPTIONS loads the instrumentation before your app's code. Start the app as usual; requests show up within about 5 seconds.

What it doesn't do

• console.log isn't sent. Only pino, winston and bunyan are captured.
• Errors you catch yourself become issues only when you record them on the span: trace.getActiveSpan()?.recordException(err).
• Bundled code: source maps aren't applied, so stack traces name the files Node runs.

Let your agent do it

Add OpenTelemetry to this Node.js app so it reports to Lampwick: follow https://lampwick.dev/docs/node.md exactly (zero-code setup, environment variables, no code changes besides a pino logger if the app has no logger). Read the ingest token from the environment, never commit it.

Next step

The Node.js docs have the app we tested, what showed up and the troubleshooting table. How spans map to Lampwick: OpenTelemetry.