Docs » Supported integrations in Splunk Observability Cloud » Instrument back-end applications to send spans to Splunk APM

Instrument back-end applications to send spans to Splunk APM 🔗

You can instrument your back-end services and applications to send metrics and traces to Splunk Observability Cloud.

How to send application data to Splunk Observability Cloud¶

You have the following options to send app and service data to Splunk Observability Cloud:

flowchart LR accTitle: Back-end instrumentation diagram accDescr: OpenTelemetry instrumentation encompasses back-end applications and serverless functions. Instrumentation sends back-end application metrics, traces, and logs to the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector, which sends them to Splunk APM. Instrumentation also sends back-end application metrics, traces, and logs to Splunk APM through the API. Instrumentation sends serverless function metrics, traces, and logs to Splunk APM using the API. subgraph "\nOpenTelemetry instrumentation" A["Back-end applications (Go, Python, Ruby, ...)"] B["Serverless functions (AWS Lambda, Azure, GCP)"] end A -- "traces, metrics, logs" --> O O["Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector"] O --> M["Splunk APM"] A -- "traces, metrics, logs (API)" --> M B -- "traces, metrics, logs (API)" --> M

Limitations to using the API¶

If you send your APM data directly to Splunk Observability Cloud without using the Collector, keep in mind the following limitations:

Available language instrumentations¶

You can instrument applications in each of these languages using official Splunk instrumentation:

To send spans from the Istio service mesh, see Send traces from Istio to Splunk Observability Cloud.

To learn more about the data collected by Splunk Observability Cloud, see:

To learn about the performance impact associated with instrumenting your back-end applications, see How to Think About Instrumentation Overhead in the Splunk Community blog.

This page was last updated on Jan 14, 2025.