OpenTelemetry Comes to IntelliJ IDEA, GoLand, PyCharm, and WebStorm

Summary

With the 2026.2 release, JetBrains expanded its OpenTelemetry plugin from Rider to IntelliJ IDEA, GoLand, PyCharm, and WebStorm. The tool captures logs, metrics, traces, and service maps locally without requiring an external observability backend. Developers can search structured log records, plot metric values over time, inspect distributed spans, and verify communication paths across databases and message queues during local runs. To ingest telemetry, the plugin automatically configures OpenTelemetry Protocol environment variables for supported run configurations and terminal sessions, or accepts forwarded data from existing collectors. Additionally, experimental Model Context Protocol support allows AI coding agents to query gathered logs, spans, and service topology.

Context

Developers troubleshooting complex local applications often face difficulty tracing multi-service failures or noisy telemetry data using plain console output alone without setting up a full local observability backend.

Approach / What changed

JetBrains extended its OpenTelemetry plugin to IntelliJ IDEA, GoLand, PyCharm, and WebStorm, adding a built-in OTLP receiver that ingests local telemetry and provides tool windows for logs, metrics, traces, service maps, and MCP-based agent queries.

Takeaways

• The OpenTelemetry plugin is available across IntelliJ IDEA, GoLand, PyCharm, WebStorm, and Rider starting with the 2026.2 release.
• Applications do not get instrumented automatically by the plugin; instead, it provides a built-in receiver and passes OTLP environment variables to supported IDE run configurations and terminal sessions.
• Experimental MCP tools enable coding agents to programmatically query local logs, spans, services, and service maps via the JetBrains MCP server.

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