Docs » Get started with the Splunk Distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector » Splunk Add-On for the OpenTelemetry Collector » Configure the Technical Add-on for the Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector

Configure the Technical Add-on for the Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector 🔗

To configure the OpenTelemetry Collector within the Add-on, follow these steps:

  1. Create a new configuration file in YAML format for the Collector. See more at Get started: Understand and use the Collector.

  2. Edit the default version of your inputs.conf file to point to the new configuration file.

  3. Restart the Splunk Universal Forwarder.

Activate trace collection 🔗

The Splunk Add-on for the OpenTelemetry Collector does not perform automatic tracing. To configure your Collector instance to receive traces from your applications, see Instrument back-end applications to send spans to Splunk APM.

Manage multiple Collectors 🔗

If your configuration uses more than one Collector, consider the following best practices:

  • Deploy different agent_config.yaml files to different hosts. For example, a version of the add-on with MySQL Receiver enabled, and a different version of the add-on with MS SQL Server Receiver enabled will work best when deployed on different hosts.

  • Deploy the same files to every host, then point to another agent_config.yaml file in inputs.conf in the splunk_config_dir or splunk_config_yaml properties.

  • Deploy the same instance of the Splunk Add-on for the OpenTelemetry Collector to all hosts, then deploy another instance of the add-on that does not contain binaries and only contains a YAML file with a specific receiver enabled. In this case, the YAML file from the second add-on instance will supersede the YAML from the first add-on instance on a particular host.

  • Designate one instance of the Splunk Add-on for the OpenTelemetry Collector as your default Collector, tailor it to your needs, and then create variants of the add-on using a different name. Then deploy each variant to a different server class.

This page was last updated on Oct 02, 2024.