Quick start
The OpenTelemetry Collector receives traces, metrics, and logs, processes the telemetry, and exports it to a wide variety of observability backends using its components. For a conceptual overview of the Collector, see Collector.
You are going to learn to do the following in less than five minutes:
- Set up and run the OpenTelemetry Collector.
- Send telemetry and see it processed by the Collector.
Prerequisites
Make sure that your developer environment has the following. This page assumes
that you’re using bash
. Adapt configuration and commands as necessary for your
preferred shell.
- Docker or any compatible containers’ runtime.
- Go 1.20 or higher
GOBIN
environment variable is set; if unset, initialize it appropriately, for example1:export GOBIN=${GOBIN:-$(go env GOPATH)/bin}
Set up the environment
Pull in the OpenTelemetry Collector Contrib Docker image:
docker pull otel/opentelemetry-collector-contrib:0.110.0
Install the telemetrygen utility:
go install github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/cmd/telemetrygen@latest
This utility can simulate a client generating traces, metrics, and logs.
Generate and collect telemetry
Launch the Collector:
docker run \ -p 127.0.0.1:4317:4317 \ -p 127.0.0.1:55679:55679 \ otel/opentelemetry-collector-contrib:0.110.0 \ 2>&1 | tee collector-output.txt # Optionally tee output for easier search later
In a separate terminal window, generate a few sample traces:
$GOBIN/telemetrygen traces --otlp-insecure --traces 3
Among the output generated by the utility, you should see a confirmation that traces were generated:
2024-01-16T14:33:15.692-0500 INFO traces/worker.go:99 traces generated {"worker": 0, "traces": 3} 2024-01-16T14:33:15.692-0500 INFO traces/traces.go:58 stop the batch span processor
For an easier time seeing relevant output you can filter it:
$GOBIN/telemetrygen traces --otlp-insecure \ --traces 3 2>&1 | grep -E 'start|traces|stop'
In the terminal window running the Collector container, you should see trace ingest activity similar to what is shown in the following example:
$ grep -E '^Span|(ID|Name|Kind|time|Status \w+)\s+:' ./collector-output.txt Span #0 Trace ID : f30faffbde5fcf71432f89da1bf7bc14 Parent ID : 6f1ff7f9cf4ec1c7 ID : 8d1e820c1ac57337 Name : okey-dokey Kind : Server Start time : 2024-01-16 14:13:54.585877 +0000 UTC End time : 2024-01-16 14:13:54.586 +0000 UTC Status code : Unset Status message : Span #1 Trace ID : f30faffbde5fcf71432f89da1bf7bc14 Parent ID : ID : 6f1ff7f9cf4ec1c7 Name : lets-go Kind : Client Start time : 2024-01-16 14:13:54.585877 +0000 UTC End time : 2024-01-16 14:13:54.586 +0000 UTC Status code : Unset Status message : ...
Open http://localhost:55679/debug/tracez and select one of the samples in the table to see the traces you’ve just generated.
After you are done, shutdown the Collector container, for example, using Control-C.
Next steps
In this tutorial you’ve started the OpenTelemetry Collector and sent telemetry to it. As next steps, consider doing the following:
- Explore different ways to install the Collector.
- Learn about the different modes of the Collector in Deployment Methods.
- Familiarize yourself with the Collector configuration files and structure.
- Explore available components in the registry.
- Learn how to build a custom Collector with the OpenTelemetry Collector Builder (OCB).
For more information, see Your first program. ↩︎
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