Docs » Get started with the Splunk Distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector » Install and deploy the Collector » Install the Collector for Linux with the installer script

Install the Collector for Linux with the installer script 🔗

The Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector for Linux is a package that provides integrated collection and forwarding for all data types.

Install the package using one of these methods:

Installer script 🔗

The following Linux distributions and versions are supported:

  • Amazon Linux: 2, 2023. Log collection with Fluentd is not currently supported for Amazon Linux 2023.

  • CentOS, Red Hat, or Oracle: 7, 8, 9

  • Debian: 9, 10, 11

  • SUSE: 12, 15 for versions v0.34.0 or higher. Log collection with Fluentd is not currently supported.

  • Ubuntu: 16.04, 18.04, 20.04, and 22.04

The installer script deploys and configures these elements:

  • The Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector for Linux

  • Fluentd, using the td-agent. See Fluent Forward receiver for more information

To install the package using the installer script, follow these steps:

  1. Ensure you have systemd, curl and sudo installed.

  2. Download and execute the installer script.

  3. Replace the following variables for your environment:

curl -sSL https://dl.signalfx.com/splunk-otel-collector.sh > /tmp/splunk-otel-collector.sh;
sudo sh /tmp/splunk-otel-collector.sh --realm SPLUNK_REALM --memory SPLUNK_MEMORY_TOTAL_MIB -- SPLUNK_ACCESS_TOKEN

Run additional script options 🔗

To display additional configuration options supported by the script, use the -h flag.

curl -sSL https://dl.signalfx.com/splunk-otel-collector.sh > /tmp/splunk-otel-collector.sh;
sh /tmp/splunk-otel-collector.sh -h

Configure memory allocation 🔗

To configure memory allocation, change the --memory parameter. By default, this parameter is set to 512 MiB, or 500 x 2^20 bytes, of memory. Increase this setting to allocate more memory, as shown in the following example.

curl -sSL https://dl.signalfx.com/splunk-otel-collector.sh > /tmp/splunk-otel-collector.sh;
sudo sh /tmp/splunk-otel-collector.sh --realm SPLUNK_REALM --memory SPLUNK_MEMORY_TOTAL_MIB \
    -- SPLUNK_ACCESS_TOKEN

Configure proxy settings 🔗

If you need to use a proxy, set one of the following environment variables according to your needs:

  • HTTP_PROXY: Address of the proxy for HTTP request. Port is optional.

  • HTTPS_PROXY: Address of the proxy for HTTPS request. Port is optional.

  • NO_PROXY: If a proxy is defined, sets addressess that don’t use the proxy.

Restart the Collector after adding these environment variables to your configuration.

Note

For more information on proxy settings, see Configure proxy settings.

Use configured repos 🔗

By default, apt/yum/zypper repo definition files are created to download the package and Fluentd deb/rpm packages from https://splunk.jfrog.io/splunk and https://packages.treasuredata.com, respectively.

To skip these steps and use configured repos on the target system that provide the splunk-otel-collector and td-agent deb/rpm packages, specify the --skip-collector-repo or --skip-fluentd-repo options. For example:

curl -sSL https://dl.signalfx.com/splunk-otel-collector.sh > /tmp/splunk-otel-collector.sh && \
sudo sh /tmp/splunk-otel-collector.sh --realm SPLUNK_REALM --skip-collector-repo --skip-fluentd-repo \
 -- SPLUNK_ACCESS_TOKEN

Configure Fluentd 🔗

Note

If you don’t need to collect logs, run the installer script with the --without-fluentd option to skip installation of Fluentd and the plugins and dependencies described in this section.

By default, the Fluentd service is installed and configured to forward log events with the @SPLUNK label to the package, which then sends these events to the HEC ingest endpoint determined by the --realm <SPLUNK_REALM> option. For example, https://ingest.<SPLUNK_REALM>.signalfx.com/v1/log.

The following Fluentd plugins are also installed:

  • capng_c for activating Linux capabilities.

  • fluent-plugin-systemd for systemd journal log collection.

Additionally, the following dependencies are installed as prerequisites for the Fluentd plugins:

Debian-based systems:

  • build-essential

  • libcap-ng0

  • libcap-ng-dev

  • pkg-config

RPM-based systems:

  • Development Tools

  • libcap-ng

  • libcap-ng-devel

  • pkgconfig

You can specify the following parameters to configure the package to send log events to a custom Splunk HTTP Event Collector (HEC) endpoint URL:

  • hec-url = "<URL>"

  • hec-token = "<TOKEN>"

HEC lets you send data and application events to a Splunk deployment over the HTTP and Secure HTTP (HTTPS) protocols. See Set up and use HTTP Event Collector in Splunk Web

The main Fluentd configuration is installed to /etc/otel/collector/fluentd/fluent.conf. Custom Fluentd source configuration files can be added to the /etc/otel/collector/fluentd/conf.d directory after installation.

Note the following:

  • In this directory, all files with the .conf extension are automatically included by Fluentd.

  • The td-agent user must have permissions to access the configuration files and the paths defined within.

  • By default, Fluentd is configured to collect systemd journal log events from /var/log/journal.

After any configuration modification, run sudo systemctl restart td-agent to restart the td-agent service.

If the td-agent package is upgraded after initial installation, you might need to set the Linux capabilities for the new version by performing the following steps for td-agent versions 4.1 or later:

  1. Check for the activated capabilities:

    sudo /opt/td-agent/bin/fluent-cap-ctl --get -f /opt/td-agent/bin/ruby
Capabilities in '/opt/td-agent/bin/ruby',
Effective:   dac_override, dac_read_search
Inheritable: dac_override, dac_read_search
Permitted:   dac_override, dac_read_search

  2. If the output from the previous command does not include dac_override and dac_read_search as shown above, run the following commands:

    sudo td-agent-gem install capng_c
sudo /opt/td-agent/bin/fluent-cap-ctl --add "dac_override,dac_read_search" -f /opt/td-agent/bin/ruby
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl restart td-agent

If you already installed Fluentd on a host, install the Splunk OTel Collector without Fluentd using the --without-fluentd option. For more information, see Configure the Collector.

Configure automatic instrumentation for Java 🔗

You can also automatically instrument your Java applications along with the Collector installation. Auto instrumentation removes the need to install and configure the Java agent separately. See Splunk OpenTelemetry Zero Configuration Auto Instrumentation for Java for the installation instructions. For more information on Java instrumentation, see Instrument Java applications for Splunk Observability Cloud.

Install the Collector using deployment tools 🔗

Splunk offers the configuration management options described in this section.

Amazon ECS EC2 🔗

Note

Available for Prometheus only.

Splunk provides a task definition to deploy the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector to ECS EC2. The task definition is a text file, in JSON format, that describes one or more containers that form your application. See Amazon ECS EC2 for the installation instructions.

Amazon Fargate 🔗

Note

Available for Prometheus only. Not yet available for Amazon EKS.

Splunk provides a guided setup to deploy the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector on Amazon Fargate as a sidecar (additional container) to Amazon ECS tasks. See Amazon Fargate for the installation instructions.

Ansible 🔗

Splunk provides an Ansible role that installs the package configured to collect data (metrics, traces, and logs) from Linux machines and send that data to Observability Cloud. See Ansible for Linux for the instructions to download and customize the role.

Chef 🔗

Splunk provides a cookbook to install the Collector using Chef. See Chef for the installation instructions.

Heroku 🔗

The Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector for Heroku is a buildpack for the Collector. The buildpack installs and runs the Collector on a Dyno to receive, process, and export metric and trace data for Splunk Observability Cloud. See Heroku for the steps to install the buildpack.

Nomad 🔗

Use Nomad to to deploy the Collector. See Nomad for the installation instructions.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry 🔗

You can use one of these three options to deploy the Collector with Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF):

  • Collector standalone deployment.

  • Collector as a sidecar to your app.

  • Tanzu Tile.

See more in Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

Puppet 🔗

Splunk provides a Puppet module to install and configure the package. A module is a collection of resources, classes, files, definition, and templates. See Puppet for Linux for the instructions to download and customize the module.

Salt 🔗

Splunk provides a Salt formula to install and configure the Collector. See Salt for the instructions.

Next steps 🔗

After you’ve installed the package, you can perform these actions: