As a frontend / web developer, you're probably already very familiar with .har (or HTTP Archive) files. When you open Chrome DevTools and look at the network tab, you can choose to export those requests and the timeline as a self-contained archive - the HAR file.

That's great, but HAR files are clunky, you need to send them (as email attachments? Yuck) to other devs. Then they need to load them up in an analyser. As I said, suboptimal.

On the other hand, you've probably also heard of OpenTelemetry - that's basically the live, real-time equivalent - distributed traces as requests flow through your system.

Now there's a way to convert HAR files to OpenTelemetry traces

What if you could take that .har file and send it on it's way to your OpenTelemetry backend system like Jaeger, Datadog, Dynatrace or Honeycomb?

Well, now you can:

docker run \
  --mount type=bind,source="$(pwd)",target=/files \
  gardnera/har-to-otel:dev \
  -f /files/YOUR-HAR-FILE.har \
  -ep http://host.docker.internal:4318 \
  --insecure true

Standalone Binaries are coming

Just like tracepusher, the HAR to OTEL converter will be offered as standalone binaries. Soon you'll be able to do:

./har-to-otel \
  -f /files/YOUR-HAR-FILE.har \
  -ep http://opentelemetry-collector:4318 \
  --insecure true

But! We need your help! We need feedback. We need testers. Get involved by commenting or dropping a 👍 on this issue and / or ⭐ the tracepusher repo. The more 👀 we have on this, the better it will be.

I want to use it! Show me the Instructions

The documentation for har-to-otel can be found here: HAR file to OpenTelemetry converter