Tracing Python Applications

Docs > APM > Application Instrumentation > Add the Datadog Tracing Library > Tracing Python Applications

Compatibility requirements

For a full list of Datadog’s Python version and framework support (including legacy and maintenance versions), read the Compatibility Requirements page.

Getting started

Before you begin, make sure you’ve already installed and configured the Agent.

Instrument your application

After you install and configure your Datadog Agent, the next step is to add the tracing library directly in the application to instrument it. Read more about compatibility information.

To begin tracing applications written in Python, install the Datadog Tracing library, ddtrace, using pip:

pip install ddtrace

Note: This command requires pip version 18.0.0 or greater. For Ubuntu, Debian, or another package manager, update your pip version with the following command:

pip install --upgrade pip

Then to instrument your Python application use the included ddtrace-run command. To use it, prefix your Python entry-point command with ddtrace-run.

For example, if your application is started with python app.py then:

ddtrace-run python app.py

Once you’ve finished setup and are running the tracer with your application, you can run ddtrace-run --info to check that configurations are working as expected. Note that the output from this command does not reflect configuration changes made during runtime in code.

Configuration

The tracing library can be configured through environment variables. This is the recommended approach for setting the Agent host, port, and other settings.

For a comprehensive list of configuration options, including Unified Service Tagging, see the Library Configuration documentation.