Docs » Manage services, spans, and traces in Splunk APM » Compatible span formats for Splunk APM

Compatible span formats for Splunk APM 🔗

Splunk APM supports a variety of span formats, depending on which agent, collector, or endpoint receives and exports trace data. For more information about instrumenting applications for Splunk APM, see Instrument your applications and services to get spans into Splunk APM.

For more information on the ingest API endpoints, see Send APM traces .

Span formats compatible with the OpenTelemetry Collector 🔗

The Splunk Distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector can collect spans in the following format:

  • Jaeger: gRPC and Thrift

  • Zipkin v1, v2 JSON

  • Splunk APM Protocol (SAPM)

  • OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP)

The following examples show how to configure receivers in the collector configuration file. You can use multiple receivers according to your needs.

# To receive spans in Jaeger Thrift format

receivers:
   jaeger:
      protocols:
         grpc:
            endpoint: 0.0.0.0:14250
         thrift_binary:
            endpoint: 0.0.0.0:6832
         thrift_compact:
            endpoint: 0.0.0.0:6831
         thrift_http:
            endpoint: 0.0.0.0:14268

See Get started: Understand and use the Collector for more information on Collector configuration.

Span formats compatible with the ingest endpoint 🔗

If you can’t use or need to bypass the Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector, you can send your span data directly to the ingest API endpoints of Observability Cloud.

The ingest endpoint for Splunk Observability Cloud at https://ingest.<realm>.signalfx.com/v2/trace can receive spans directly in the following formats:

  • OTLP at /v2/trace/otlp with Content-Type:application/x-protobuf

  • Jaeger Thrift with Content-Type:application/x-thrift

  • Zipkin v1, v2 with Content-Type:application/json

  • SAPM with Content-Type:application/x-protobuf

In addition, the following endpoints are available:

  • OTLP at /v2/trace/otlp with Content-Type:application/x-protobuf

  • Jaeger Thrift at /v2/trace/jaegerthrift with Content-Type:application/x-thrift

  • Zipkin v1, v2 at /v2/trace/signalfxv1 with Content-Type:application/json

  • SAPM at /v2/trace/sapm with Content-Type:application/x-protobuf

For more information on the ingest API endpoints, see Send APM traces .

Note

You can also send trace data in OTLP format directly to Observability Cloud using the gRPC endpoint, either directly or from an OpenTelemetry Collector. See Send traces to Splunk Observability Cloud using the gRPC endpoint.

Span formats compatible with the Smart Agent (deprecated) 🔗

The Smart Agent can receive the following span formats with the signalfx-forwarder monitor:

  • Jaeger: gRPC and Thrift

  • Zipkin v1, v2 JSON

The Smart Agent can export the following span formats using the writer exporter:

  • Zipkin v1, v2 JSON

  • SAPM

To configure the Smart Agent for Splunk APM, see Install and configure the SignalFx Smart Agent.