Exporters

Send telemetry to the OpenTelemetry Collector to make sure it’s exported correctly. Using the Collector in production environments is a best practice. To visualize your telemetry, export it to a backend such as Jaeger, Zipkin, Prometheus, or a vendor-specific backend.

Available exporters

The registry contains a list of exporters for Rust.

Among exporters, OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) exporters are designed with the OpenTelemetry data model in mind, emitting OTel data without any loss of information. Furthermore, many tools that operate on telemetry data support OTLP (such as Prometheus, Jaeger, and most vendors), providing you with a high degree of flexibility when you need it. To learn more about OTLP, see OTLP Specification.

This page covers the main OpenTelemetry Rust exporters and how to set them up.

OTLP endpoint

To send trace data to a OTLP endpoint (like the collector or Jaeger) you’ll want to use an exporter crate, such as opentelemetry-otlp:

For example, you can update the Getting Started dice server by adding the new dependency:

[dependencies]
opentelemetry-otlp = { version = "0.28.0", features = ["grpc-tonic"] }

Next, update init_tracer_provider in dice_server.rs to configure the exporter to point at an OTLP endpoint:

use std::convert::Infallible;
use std::net::SocketAddr;
use std::sync::OnceLock;

use http_body_util::Full;
use hyper::{Method, Request, Response, body::Bytes, server::conn::http1, service::service_fn};
use hyper_util::rt::TokioIo;
use opentelemetry::global::{self, BoxedTracer};
use opentelemetry::trace::{Span, SpanKind, Status, Tracer};
use opentelemetry_otlp::SpanExporter;
use opentelemetry_sdk::{Resource, propagation::TraceContextPropagator, trace::SdkTracerProvider};
use rand::Rng;
use tokio::net::TcpListener;

// ...

fn init_tracer_provider() -> SdkTracerProvider {
    let exporter = SpanExporter::builder()
        .with_tonic()
        .build()
        .expect("Failed to create span exporter");
    let provider = SdkTracerProvider::builder()
        .with_resource(Resource::builder().with_service_name("dice_server").build())
        .with_batch_exporter(exporter)
        .build();
    global::set_text_map_propagator(TraceContextPropagator::new());
    global::set_tracer_provider(provider.clone());
    provider
}

To try out the OTLP exporter quickly, you can run Jaeger in a docker container. Jaeger natively supports OTLP, so you only need to expose the web UI (16686) and the OTLP gRPC endpoint (4317):

docker run -d --rm --name jaeger \
  -p 16686:16686 \
  -p 4317:4317 \
  jaegertracing/all-in-one:latest

By default, the OTLP exporter sends data to http://localhost:4317, which matches the OTLP gRPC endpoint exposed by Jaeger above, so no additional endpoint configuration is needed.

Make requests on http://localhost:8080/rolldice, then view the traces in Jaeger:

1. Open http://localhost:16686 and refresh.
2. Select dice_server from the Service dropdown.
3. Click Find Traces.

Click a trace to open the trace details view, which shows the span hierarchy and timing as a Gantt chart.

When you’re done, stop the Jaeger container:

docker stop jaeger