Installation

Basic install

pip install helixobs

This includes everything needed for entity tracking and sidecar log delivery (otlp=False, the default).

OTLP log shipping

If your pipeline runs without a sidecar log collector (Alloy or similar) and you want to ship logs directly to the OTel Collector, install the OTLP exporter:

pip install "helixobs[otlp]"

This adds opentelemetry-exporter-otlp-proto-grpc, required for configure_logging(otlp=True).

Development install

git clone https://github.com/HelixObs/client-python
cd client-python
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest

Python version support

Python 3.9 and later.

Which log mode should I use?

Situation	Recommended mode
Running in a Docker environment where Grafana Alloy is already scraping container logs	otlp=False (default) — Alloy handles delivery
Greenfield service with no log sidecar	otlp=True — logs go directly to the OTel Collector
Running both Alloy and OTLP	Use otlp=False to avoid duplicate log delivery

See Structured Logging for details on both modes.