OpenTelemetry in PowerShell: Observability for Your Scripts

Modern applications are instrumented with distributed tracing — so why should your PowerShell automation be any different? With OtelCollector, you can send OpenTelemetry traces and metrics from your PowerShell scripts to any compatible observability backend.

The Observability Gap in Automation

When a deployment script fails at 2 AM, what do you have to debug with? Usually just raw log lines. You can’t easily tell:

How long each step took
Which call in a chain of API requests was the slow one
Whether a transient error or a genuine failure caused the problem

OpenTelemetry solves this with distributed traces — a structured, hierarchical view of what happened and when.

Introducing OtelCollector

OtelCollector (the OtelCollector PowerShell module) wraps the OpenTelemetry .NET SDK, making it straightforward to create traces and spans from PowerShell scripts.

Install

Install-Module -Name OtelCollector -Scope CurrentUser
Import-Module OtelCollector

Requires PowerShell 7.0+

Core Concepts

Trace: A complete end-to-end operation (e.g., a full deployment run)
Span: A named, timed operation within a trace (e.g., “download packages”, “run migrations”)
Attributes: Key-value metadata attached to spans
Events: Time-stamped log points within a span

Instrumenting a Deployment Script

Here’s a real-world example: tracing a deployment pipeline.

Import-Module OtelCollector

# Initialize — point to your OTLP endpoint
Initialize-OtelTracer -ServiceName "Deployment" `
                      -Endpoint "http://otel-collector.internal:4317" `
                      -ServiceVersion "1.0.0"

# Root span for the entire deployment
$deploy = Start-OtelSpan -Name "deploy"
Set-OtelSpanAttribute -Span $deploy -Key "deploy.target"      -Value "production"
Set-OtelSpanAttribute -Span $deploy -Key "deploy.version"     -Value "v2.5.0"
Set-OtelSpanAttribute -Span $deploy -Key "deploy.triggered_by" -Value $env:BUILD_USER

try {
    # --- Step 1: Validate ---
    $validate = Start-OtelSpan -Name "validate-artifacts" -ParentSpan $deploy
    Test-DeploymentArtifacts -Path "./artifacts"
    Stop-OtelSpan -Span $validate

    # --- Step 2: Database Migration ---
    $migrate = Start-OtelSpan -Name "database-migration" -ParentSpan $deploy
    Set-OtelSpanAttribute -Span $migrate -Key "db.server" -Value "prod-db"
    Invoke-DatabaseMigration -Server "prod-db"
    Stop-OtelSpan -Span $migrate

    # --- Step 3: Deploy App ---
    $appDeploy = Start-OtelSpan -Name "deploy-application" -ParentSpan $deploy
    Deploy-Application -Target "prod-web" -Version "v2.5.0"
    Stop-OtelSpan -Span $appDeploy

    Set-OtelSpanStatus -Span $deploy -Status "Ok"
    Write-Host "✅ Deployment complete"

} catch {
    Set-OtelSpanStatus -Span $deploy -Status "Error" -Description $_.Exception.Message
    Add-OtelSpanEvent -Span $deploy -Name "deployment.failed" `
                     -Attributes @{ "error.message" = $_.Exception.Message }
    Write-Error "❌ Deployment failed: $_"
    throw
} finally {
    Stop-OtelSpan -Span $deploy
}

Visualizing in Jaeger

Once you’re sending traces, fire up Jaeger locally:

docker run -d --name jaeger \
  -p 16686:16686 \
  -p 4317:4317 \
  jaegertracing/all-in-one:latest

Then open http://localhost:16686 to see your PowerShell traces with full flame graphs and timing data.

Sending Metrics

Beyond traces, OtelCollector can send metrics:

# Track job throughput
Add-OtelMetric -Name "jobs.completed" -Value 1 -Type Counter `
               -Attributes @{ job_type = "email"; status = "success" }

# Track queue depth
Add-OtelMetric -Name "queue.size" -Value (Get-QueueDepth) -Type Gauge `
               -Attributes @{ queue = "notifications" }

Supported Backends

OtelCollector sends data via the standard OTLP protocol, which is supported by:

Backend	Notes
Jaeger	Great for local development
Grafana Tempo	Pairs well with Grafana dashboards
Azure Monitor	Native Azure integration
Datadog	Via OTLP ingestion endpoint
Honeycomb	Excellent query UX

Conclusion

You shouldn’t have to choose between “write a script” and “have observability.” With OtelCollector, you can have both. Start small — add a root span to your next deployment script — and build from there.

Install-Module -Name OtelCollector -Scope CurrentUser

Source code and full documentation: GitHub.