Telemetry

About

Telemetry data such as logs, metrics, and traces will help developers understand the internal state of the system. This page walks though different types of telemetry and observability available in Toolbox.

Toolbox exports telemetry data of logs via standard out/err, and traces/metrics through OpenTelemetry. Additional flags can be passed to Toolbox to enable different logging behavior, or to export metrics through a specific exporter.

Logging

The following flags can be used to customize Toolbox logging:

Example:

./toolbox --tools_file "tools.yaml" --log-level warn --logging-format json

Level

Toolbox supports the following log levels, including:

Toolbox will only output logs that are equal or more severe to the level that it is set. Below are the log levels that Toolbox supports in the order of severity.

Format

Toolbox supports both standard and structured logging format.

The standard logging outputs log as string:

2024-11-12T15:08:11.451377-08:00 INFO "Initialized 0 sources.\n"

The structured logging outputs log as JSON:

{
  "timestamp":"2024-11-04T16:45:11.987299-08:00",
  "severity":"ERROR",
  "logging.googleapis.com/sourceLocation":{...},
  "message":"unable to parse tool file at \"tools.yaml\": \"cloud-sql-postgres1\" is not a valid kind of data source"
}

Telemetry

Toolbox is supports exporting metrics and traces to any OpenTelemetry compatible exporter.

Metrics

A metric is a measurement of a service captured at runtime. The collected data can be used to provide important insights into the service. Toolbox provides the following custom metrics:

All custom metrics have the following attributes/labels:

Traces

A trace is a tree of spans that shows the path that a request makes through an application.

Spans generated by Toolbox server is prefixed with toolbox/server/. For example, when user run Toolbox, it will generate spans for the following, with toolbox/server/init as the root span:

Resource Attributes

All metrics and traces generated within Toolbox will be associated with a unified resource. The list of resource attributes included are:

Exporter

An exporter is responsible for processing and exporting telemetry data. Toolbox generates telemetry data within the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP), and user can choose to use exporters that are designed to support the OpenTelemetry Protocol. Within Toolbox, we provide two types of exporter implementation to choose from, either the Google Cloud Exporter that will send data directly to the backend, or the OTLP Exporter along with a Collector that will act as a proxy to collect and export data to the telemetry backend of user’s choice.

Google Cloud Exporter

The Google Cloud Exporter directly exports telemetry to Google Cloud Monitoring. It utilizes the GCP Metric Exporter and GCP Trace Exporter.

OTLP Exporter

This implementation uses the default OTLP Exporter over HTTP for metrics and traces. You can use this exporter if you choose to export your telemetry data to a Collector.

Collector

A collector acts as a proxy between the application and the telemetry backend. It receives telemetry data, transforms it, and then exports data to backends that can store it permanently. Toolbox provide an option to export telemetry data to user’s choice of backend(s) that are compatible with the Open Telemetry Protocol (OTLP). If you would like to use a collector, please refer to this Export Telemetry using the Otel Collector.

Flags

The following flags are used to determine Toolbox’s telemetry configuration:

In addition to the flags noted above, you can also make additional configuration for OpenTelemetry via the General SDK Configuration through environmental variables.

Examples:

To enable Google Cloud Exporter:

./toolbox --telemetry-gcp

To enable OTLP Exporter, provide Collector endpoint:

./toolbox --telemetry-otlp="http://127.0.0.1:4553"