Nasdanika Knowledge

Collector

Collector receives, processes, and exports telemetry data.

Container image in GCP Cloud

One way to quickly start with OpenTelemetry is to run a collector with a front end as a Docker container.

The below instructions explain how to start an OpenTelemetry collector with Grafana in Google Cloud:

  • Open the Console
  • Create a VM
  • Enable HTTP
  • Modify the firewall HTTP rule by adding ports 3000, 4317, and 4318
  • Start the VM and connect to it over SSH
  • sudo bash - become a root
  • apt install podman
  • podman pull docker.io/grafana/otel-lgtm
  • podman run -p 3000:3000 -p 4317:4317 -p 4318:4318 grafana/otel-lgtm. See docker-otel-lgtm GitHub repository for details.
  • After you restart the VM:
    • podman ps -a, copy container ID or name
    • podman start <container name or ID>
  • In your auto-configured Java applications add -Dotel.java.global-autoconfigure.enabled=true -Dotel.metrics.exporter=otlp -Dotel.logs.exporter=otlp -Dotel.traces.exporter=otlp -Dotel.exporter.otlp.endpoint=http://<VM external IP>:4317 -Dotel.service.name=<service name> properties to the command line. You can also use environment variables. See Environment variables and system properties for more details.
  • Open http://<VM external IP>:3000 in a web browser

Grafana Cloud

Another option, out of many, is to use Grafana Cloud. You would have to install Grafana Alloy on your machine.