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Overview of the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector 🔗

This page provides an overview of the resources available for using the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector. To learn more, read Use case: Monitor infrastructure and apps in a cloud environment using the Splunk OTel Collector.

Note

This project is currently in Beta. See Beta Definition for more information.

Get started 🔗

The following table describes everything you need to start using the Collector:

Resource

Description

Access token

Use an access token to track and manage your resource usage. Where you see <access_token>, replace it with the name of your access token. See Create and manage organization access tokens using Splunk Observability Cloud.

Realm

A realm is a self-contained deployment that hosts organizations. You can find your realm name on your profile page in the user interface. Where you see <REALM>, replace it with the name of your organization’s realm. See realms.

Agent or Gateway mode

In Agent mode, the Collector runs with the application or on the same host as the application. In Gateway mode, one or more collectors run a standalone service, for example, a container or deployment. See Collector deployment modes.

Ports and endpoints

Check exposed ports to make sure your environment doesn’t have conflicts and that firewalls are configured properly. You can change the ports in the Collector configuration. See Exposed ports and endpoints.

See also Collector requirements.

Install and configure the Collector 🔗

Learn how to install, deploy, upgrade or uninstall the Collector in Install and deploy the Collector.

This distribution is supported on and packaged for a variety of platforms, including:

Next, read our docs on how to configure the Collector, including other configuration sources.

Monitor the Collector 🔗

The default configuration automatically scrapes the Collector own metrics and sends the data using the signalfx exporter. A built-in dashboard provides information about the health and status of Collector instances.

In addition, logs should be collected. For Log Observer customers, logs are automatically collected for the Collector and Journald processes.

The Collector also offers zPages. zPages provide in-process web pages that display collected data from the process that they are attached to. These pages are useful for in-process diagnostics without having to depend on any back end to examine traces or metrics. These pages are useful during development time or when the process to be inspected is known in production.

Upstream OpenTelemetry Collector 🔗

You can use the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector instead of the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector, but the following features are not available:

  • Packaging, including installer scripts for Linux and Windows

  • Configuration management using Ansible or Puppet

  • Configuration sources

  • Several Smart Agent capabilities

  • Visualizations and correlations that are prepackaged in the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector

Note

Splunk officially supports the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector. Splunk only provides best-effort support for the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector.

To use the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector, follow these steps:

  1. Get the OpenTelemetry Collector contribution. This contribution includes receivers/exporters and vendor-specific components.

  2. Configure the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector. See upstream_agent_config.yaml for an example configuration for the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector. This configuration includes the recommended settings to ensure infrastructure correlation.

Troubleshooting 🔗

See Troubleshooting to resolve common issues using the OpenTelemetry Collector and the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector.