OpenTelemetry Collector

OpenTelemetry Collector Integration with Dash0

The OpenTelemetry Collector is a vendor-agnostic observability pipeline component that collects, processes, and exports telemetry data. As an official CNCF project, it provides open-source tools to enhance monitoring and observability capabilities. Dash0’s native integration with OpenTelemetry enables seamless telemetry data handling and insight generation to improve operational efficiency.

Use Cases

Empower your observability with the Dash0 integration for OpenTelemetry, enabling value-driven insights and streamlined telemetry workflows:

• Centralized Telemetry Management: Centralize telemetry forwarding, enrichment, and sampling, providing a single pipeline for data processing within Dash0 dashboards.
• Enhanced Contextual Insights: Detect and attach resource metadata to telemetry, offering deeper and more actionable insights for data visualization.
• Comprehensive Log Management: Collect and forward logs into Dash0, making it easy to manage and analyze logging data in one platform.
• Unified Metric Insights: Scrape Prometheus metric endpoints and integrate them into Dash0, ensuring seamless metric monitoring.
• Expanded Service Observability: Collect insights into third-party services and visualize them directly in Dash0.
• Metric Derivation: Derive meaningful metrics from tracing and logging telemetry, transforming raw data into actionable performance insights.

Overview

The OpenTelemetry Collector is very flexible. This setup guide will focus on the minimum configuration for existing users. Users new to the OpenTelemetry Collector may also wish to read the official OpenTelemetry Collector documentation to learn more.

Collector Configuration

You can send telemetry to Dash0 via the natively-supported OTLP exporter. It is part of every OpenTelemetry Collector distribution and is very efficient.

Once the exporter is defined, you need to hook it up within your pipelines. For example, like this:

Note that the example shown above is pretty basic, and depending on your use cases, you will likely need further receivers and processors. If you need to author an OpenTelemetry Collector configuration file, we highly recommend OTelBin to write and validate your work.

Activate internal telemetry in the Collector

The OpenTelemetry Collector allows you to configure how internal metrics are generated and exposed. By default, the Collector generates basic metrics about itself and exposes them using the OpenTelemetry Go Prometheus exporter for scraping at http://127.0.0.1:8888/metrics.

Pushing Metrics to an OTLP Backend

To push the Collector's internal metrics to an OTLP backend, use the following configuration:

Exposing Prometheus Endpoint

Alternatively, you can expose the Prometheus endpoint to one specific or all network interfaces. This is particularly useful in containerized environments where you might need to expose this port on a public interface.

Adjusting Metrics Verbosity

You can control the verbosity of the Collector's metrics output by setting the level field to one of these values:

• none: No telemetry is collected.
• basic: Essential service telemetry.
• normal: The default level, adds standard indicators on top of basic.
• detailed: The most verbose level, includes dimensions and views.

Additional Resources

• For a full working configuration example, visit this OTelBin link.
• For more detailed information, refer to the OpenTelemetry Collector Internal Telemetry documentation, https://opentelemetry.io/docs/collector/internal-telemetry/.

Collector Deployment

The OpenTelemetry Collector can be deployed in various ways, exceeding the scope of this short setup guide. To learn more, check out:

• Deployment Best Practices
• Kubernetes
  • Deployment via the Collector Helm chart
  • Deployment via the OpenTelemetry Operator

But if you need to start a Collector right now and on your local machine, you can also run it directly in Docker for quick experiments.

References

• Official OpenTelemetry Collector documentation
• OpenTelemetry Collector configuration in OTelBin