Feature Request: Add autoCollectConsole option for @pagopa/azure-tracing

[giuseppedipinto]

We have integrated the @pagopa/azure-tracing module into io-ipatente project, which hosts 4 Next.js web apps on Azure App Services.

Before this integration, we used to automatically collect console.log, console.warn, and console.error by calling .setAutoCollectConsole(true, true) from the ApplicationInsights-JS library.
This was configured in our instrumentation file: https://github.com/pagopa/io-ipatente/blob/f2a237c8c816cd3502b80c86b0fc793e507d6b96/apps/licences/src/instrumentation.node.ts#L52.

With @pagopa/azure-tracing, it doesn't seem to be possible to achieve this same behavior.
Our team needs to be able to automatically collect console output to ensure we have comprehensive logging and monitoring.

Could this feature be added (It appears to be missing) to the @pagopa/azure-tracing package?

[gunzip]

Thank you for raising this! Your observation is correct, and it highlights a significant difference between the legacy applicationinsights SDK and the modern OpenTelemetry-based approach used by new tracing packages.

OpenTelemetry standard deliberately avoids automatic patching of global objects like console. The old .setAutoCollectConsole(true) was a feature specific to the legacy AI SDK.

The new approach mandate logs which can be linked with traces (aka dependencies, in the Azure terminology).

For reference, this is the AI SDK Shim code to enrich console calls with OT fields:

https://github.com/microsoft/ApplicationInsights-node.js/blob/eeadb2d915817c0d74617acfeefc6d081b61f9e2/src/logs/diagnostic-channel/console.sub.ts

It redirects console methods to logger.emit(logRecord).

I'd share here my opinion: while we can clone such approach in @pagopa/azure-tracing, having fully embraced OT, it's a better option to just call logger.emit() yourself when you want to collect debug logs.

For example, @pagopa/azure-tracing calls logger.emit to shim the former AI trackEvent method: https://github.com/pagopa/dx/blob/main/packages/azure-tracing/src/azure/opentelemetry/logger.ts#L10

Alternatively, you can use a logger (winston, bunyan, pino, ...) instead of console.log. If you don't want to change the current codebase, you might opt to redirect console output to a structured loggers like Winston or Bunyan, but it would probably be easier to refactor the codebase to use their logging methods directly.