Deploy the Collector for Windows with Chef đź”—
Chef is a configuration management technology used to manage infrastructure on physical or virtual machines. Chef uses cookbooks to define a scenario.
Cookbooks are fundamental working units of Chef, which consists of all the details related to working units, having the capability to modify configuration and the state of any system configured as a node on Chef infrastructure. Cookbooks can run multiple tasks.
Prerequisites đź”—
You need the following resources to use Chef:
Double-check exposed ports to make sure your environment doesn’t have conflicts. You can change ports in the Collector configuration. See Exposed ports and endpoints for more information.
Windows đź”—
The following Windows versions. All versions require using PowerShell 3.0 or newer.
Windows Server 2019 64-bit
Windows Server 2022 64-bit
Windows Server 2025 64-bit
Caution
On Windows, the Collector is installed as a Windows service and its environment variables are set at the service scope, so they’re only available to the Collector service and not to the entire machine.
Install and use the Collector with Chef đź”—
Download the Chef cookbook from the Chef Supermarket , which is the site for community cookbooks.
To install the Collector, include the splunk_otel_collector::default recipe in the run_list, and set the attributes on the node’s run_state. The following is an example configuration that shows how to configure the required splunk_access_token attribute and some optional attributes:
{
"splunk-otel-collector": {
"splunk_access_token": "<SPLUNK_ACCESS_TOKEN>",
"splunk_realm": "<SPLUNK_REALM>",
}
}
Additional environment variables đź”—
Use collector_additional_env_vars to include any additional environment variables from the Collector configuration file for the Collector’s service. {} by default.
For example, if the Collector’s configuration file includes references to ${MY_CUSTOM_VAR1} and ${MY_CUSTOM_VAR2}, specify the following to allow the Collector service to expand these variables:
collector_additional_env_vars: {'MY_CUSTOM_VAR1' => 'value1', 'MY_CUSTOM_VAR2' => 'value2'}
On Linux, the variables/values will be added to the /etc/otel/collector/splunk-otel-collector.conf systemd environment file.
On Windows, the variables/values will be added to the Environment value under the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\splunk-otel-collector registry key.
Next steps đź”—
After you have installed the package, see:
View logs and errors in the Windows Event Viewer. Search for “view logs and errors” on the Microsoft documentation site for more information.