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 Collector

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 127.0.0.1:4553 (for HTTP) or the Collector’s URL.

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

   Tip

   To pass an insecure endpoint, set environment variable `OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_INSECURE=true`.
   

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.

Telemetry with Agnost AI

Agnost AI provides a managed OTLP endpoint, so you can send telemetry directly from Toolbox without running a local Collector.

Setup

1. Sign in to Agnost and retrieve your Organization ID from Agnost AI dashboard.

2. Set your organization ID as an OTLP header before running Toolbox:

   export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS="X-Agnost-Org-Id=<your-agnost-org-id>"
   

   Alternatively, add this to your shell profile or environment configuration so it is set automatically on each run.

3. Run Toolbox with the --telemetry-otlp flag pointing to the Agnost endpoint:

   ./toolbox --telemetry-otlp=otel.agnost.ai
   

Toolbox will now export traces and metrics directly to Agnost. No local Collector is required.