Using Parseable with Datasette for OpenTelemetry traces

Parseable is a brand new observability tool, compatible with OpenTelemetry, for storing and querying observability data.

Datasette 1.0a41 added support for OpenTelemetry tracing, contributed by Alex Garcia.

Here's how I ran the two together, giving me neat local visualizations of traces of Datasette responses.

Installing Parseable

I used the open source release of Parseable from their GitHub releases - I tried v3.2.4. They have a macOS Apple Silicon release (a 171MB download) which I downloaded and ran like so:

curl -fL https://github.com/parseablehq/parseable/releases/download/v3.2.4/Parseable_OSS_aarch64-apple-darwin -o parseable
chmod +x parseable
./parseable local-store

Running ./parseable local-store starts Parseable with all of the default settings, and stores data in ./data and ./staging directories. It uses ports 8000, 8001, and 8002.

Then visit http://localhost:8000/ and sign in with the default admin/admin username and password.

Running Datasette

I fetched a test database for Datasette to use:

wget https://latest.datasette.io/fixtures.db

Then I started Datasette like this:

OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=datasette-local \
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://127.0.0.1:8000 \
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_HEADERS='Authorization=Basic%20YWRtaW46YWRtaW4%3D,X-P-Stream=datasette_traces' \
OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER=otlp_json_http \
OTEL_METRICS_EXPORTER=none \
OTEL_LOGS_EXPORTER=none \
uvx --from 'opentelemetry-instrumentation==0.66b1' \
  --with 'opentelemetry-distro==0.66b1' \
  --with 'datasette==1.0a41' \
  --with 'opentelemetry-exporter-otlp-json-http==0.66b1' \
  opentelemetry-instrument datasette fixtures.db -p 8004

Note that we are not starting datasette directly - we are instead starting opentelemetry-instrument datasette ... to properly initialize the tracing.

Viewing a trace

Load up http://localhost:8004/ and click around a bit, then wait a few seconds for the traces to be sent to Parseable. Then navigate to "traces" in the Parseable web interface and you should be able to find things like this:

Each request now has a trace which shows the details of every subsequent SQL query. Consult the Datasette OpenTelemetry docs for more details.

Alternative ports

To run Parseable on ports other than 8000, 8001, and 8002:

P_ADDR=127.0.0.1:18000 ./parseable local-store \
  --grpc-port 18001 \
  --flight-port 18002

You'll need to also update Datasette's environment variable to point at the new port:

OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://127.0.0.1:18000

Created 2026-10-06T12:07:31-07:00 · Edit