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.
Install the Collector binary. Pull a binary or Docker image for the OpenTelemetry contrib collector.
Set up credentials for telemetry backend.
Set up the Collector config. Below are some examples for setting up the Collector config:
Run the Collector with the configuration file.
./otelcol-contrib --config=collector-config.yaml
Run toolbox with the
--telemetry-otlp
flag. Configure it to send them tohttp://127.0.0.1:4553
(for HTTP) or the Collector’s URL../toolbox --telemetry-otlp=http://127.0.0.1:4553
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.
Note
If you are exporting to Google Cloud monitoring, we recommend that you use the Google Cloud Exporter for traces and the Google Managed Service for Prometheus Exporter for metrics.