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.

Setup

1. Create a namespace First, create the namespace where you want to deploy the Collector. In this example, we use opentelemetry:

2. Create the Dash0 Authorization Secret Next, create a Kubernetes secret containing your Dash0 authorization token. The token can be found in the organization settings: "Auth Tokens".

3. Configure the helm chart It is recommended to deploy the OpenTelemetry Collector in two modes:

• daemonset: For node-level telemetry (e.g., logs, kubelet metrics)
• deployment: For cluster-wide telemetry

Node-level Collector (daemonset) Copy the configuration below into a file called: daemonset-values.yaml

To see the fully rendered configuration for the node-level collector visually, go to:

Cluster-wide Collector (deployment) Save the following configuration into a file named deployment-values.yaml:

To see the fully rendered configuration for the cluster-wide collector visually, go to:

For additional configuration options, see the default values.yaml file.

4. Install the OpenTelemetry Collectors Use the following commands to install both OpenTelemetry Collectors into your cluster:

To preview the resources that will be created before applying them, use (for the deployment configuration change the values to match the above):

This will output all Kubernetes resources, including the full OpenTelemetry Collector configuration.

Structured logging

To configure the OpenTelemetry Collector to output its own logs in JSON format, use the following configuration:

For more information, see the docs at https://opentelemetry.io/docs/collector/configuration/#telemetry.

References

• Official OpenTelemetry Collector documentation
• Use Otelbin.io to visualize your configuration