Export Telemetry

About

The OpenTelemetry Collector offers a vendor-agnostic implementation of how to receive, process and export telemetry data. It removes the need to run, operate, and maintain multiple agents/collectors.

Configure the Collector

To configure the collector, you will have to provide a configuration file. The configuration file consists of four classes of pipeline component that access telemetry data.

• Receivers
• Processors
• Exporters
• Connectors

Example of setting up the classes of pipeline components (in this example, we don’t use connectors):

receivers:
  otlp:
    protocols:
      http:
        endpoint: "127.0.0.1:4553"

exporters:
  googlecloud:
    project: <YOUR_GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT>

processors:
  batch:
    send_batch_size: 200

After each pipeline component is configured, you will enable it within the service section of the configuration file.

service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers: ["otlp"]
      processors: ["batch"]
      exporters: ["googlecloud"]

Running the Connector

There are a couple of steps to run and use a Collector.

1. Install the Collector binary. Pull a binary or Docker image for the OpenTelemetry contrib collector.

2. Set up credentials for telemetry backend.

3. Set up the Collector config. Below are some examples for setting up the Collector config:

   • Google Cloud Exporter
   • Google Managed Service for Prometheus Exporter

4. Run the Collector with the configuration file.

   ./otelcol-contrib --config=collector-config.yaml
   

5. Run toolbox with the --telemetry-otlp flag. Configure it to send them to http://127.0.0.1:4553 (for HTTP) or the Collector’s URL.

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

6. Once telemetry datas are collected, you can view them in your telemetry backend. If you are using GCP exporters, telemetry will be visible in GCP dashboard at Metrics Explorer and Trace Explorer.