You can use OpenTelemetry with Kratos, though the documentation does mention some limitations. Let me clarify the tracing options for you. While the Kratos documentation specifically mentions Jaeger as a supported tracing backend, Ory as a whole supports OpenTelemetry. According to the self-hosted operations documentation, Ory supports several tracing backends including OpenTelemetry, which would work with SignOz as your collector. The documentation states: > Ory supports the following tracing backends: > - OpenTelemetry > - Jaeger > - Elastic APM > - Datadog > - Zipkin > - Instana [Self-hosted Operations: Distributed tracing](https://www.ory.sh/docs/self-hosted/operations/tracing#tracing-options) For configuring OpenTelemetry with Kratos, you would need to set the following environment variables:

TRACING_SERVICE_NAME="kratos" TRACING_PROVIDER="otel" TRACING_PROVIDERS_OTLP_INSECURE=true TRACING_PROVIDERS_OTLP_SAMPLING_SAMPLING_RATIO=0.4 TRACING_PROVIDERS_OTLP_SERVER_URL="your.signoz.collector:4318" OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES="service.name=kratos,deployment.environment=your-env,service.version=your-version"

This is similar to the configuration shown in a GitHub issue for Hydra, but would apply to Kratos as well [GitHub Issue: Opentelemetry spans names have changed when changed tracing_provider](https://github.com/ory/hydra/issues/3622). Note that there is a known issue with Kratos where the

persistence.sql.NextMessages

job registers as an error in OpenTelemetry tracing, as mentioned in [GitHub Issue:

persistence.sql.NextMessages

registers as Error in otel-tracing](https://github.com/ory/kratos/issues/4013). For a local setup to test tracing, you can use the provided docker-compose file in the Kratos repository:

docker-compose -f quickstart.yml \     -f quickstart-tracing.yml \     up --build

[Kratos Guides: Distributed tracing](https://www.ory.sh/docs/kratos/guides/tracing)

Based on the environment variables I shared earlier, here's how the tracing configuration would look in YAML format for Kratos:

yaml tracing:   service_name: "kratos"   provider: "otel"   providers:     otlp:       insecure: true       sampling:         sampling_ratio: 0.4       server_url: "your.signoz.collector:4318"

You can add this to your Kratos configuration file. The

OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES

environment variable doesn't have a direct equivalent in the YAML configuration, so you might still need to set that separately as an environment variable. Remember that you can load this configuration file using the

-c

or

--config

flag when starting Kratos:

kratos --config path/to/config.yaml

The configuration file can be in JSON, YAML, or TOML format as mentioned in the [Kratos Configuration documentation](https://www.ory.sh/docs/kratos/configuring). If you need to make changes to the configuration without restarting the server, some configuration values support reloading on the fly, though the documentation doesn't specifically mention if tracing configuration is among those.