You followed the tutorial and found that it didn’t work, because the tracing.js file was not included in the output files. You copied the tracing.js file into the app folder, now it crashes because the dependencies were not included in the output files.

Solution

The solution is to create a nested Node.js project inside the Next.js app.

.
├── node_modules/
├── package.json (Next.js)
├── pages/
├── …
└── tracing/
    ├── node_modules/
    ├── package.json (OTel)
    └── index.js

Install OpenTelemtetry dependencies in the tracing directory:

cd tracing
echo '{}' > package.json
npm install --save \
  @opentelemetry/sdk-node
  @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node \
  @opentelemetry/exporter-trace-otlp-http

Resulting package.json:

{
  "dependencies": {
    "@opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node": "^0.35.0",
    "@opentelemetry/exporter-trace-otlp-http": "^0.34.0",
    "@opentelemetry/sdk-node": "^0.34.0"
  }
}

Create tracing/index.js:

const opentelemetry = require('@opentelemetry/sdk-node')
const { OTLPTraceExporter } = require('@opentelemetry/exporter-trace-otlp-http')
const {
  getNodeAutoInstrumentations,
} = require('@opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node')

const sdk = new opentelemetry.NodeSDK({
  traceExporter: new OTLPTraceExporter(),
  instrumentations: [getNodeAutoInstrumentations()],
})

sdk.start().then(() => {
  console.log('Tracing SDK started successfully')
})

After building the Next.js app, copy the tracing directory (along with its node_modules) into the output directory.