Grafana Forwarder (via OTel)

To build a forwarder from Apica to Grafana Labs using OpenTelemetry (OTel), you are essentially configuring Apica's Flow or Pipeline engine to act as a routing and transformation layer that exports data via the OTLP protocol. Since Grafana Cloud provides a native OTLP intake, this is a clean, standard-based integration.

1. Prerequisites from Grafana Labs

Before configuring Apica, you must obtain your OTLP connection details from your Grafana Cloud portal:

1. Log in to your Grafana Cloud Portal.

2. Navigate to OpenTelemetry or look for the OTLP Endpoint tile.

3. Note the following values:

4. OTLP Endpoint: (e.g., https://otlp-gateway-prod-us-central-0.grafana.net/otlp)

5. API Token/Password: Your generated Cloud Access Policy token with metrics:write, logs:write, and traces:write permissions.

2. Apica Configuration Strategy: The OTLP Forwarder

In the Apica UI (Ascent/Flow), you will create a Forwarder (or Target Destination) that uses the OpenTelemetry (OTLP) exporter.

Step A: Define the Target

In the Apica Pipeline configuration, you define the Grafana endpoint. Because Grafana Cloud requires Basic Authentication, your OTLP headers must be encoded.

• Endpoint: https://<otlp-endpoint>

• Protocol: http/protobuf (recommended over gRPC for standard web-hook style forwarding)

• Headers: Your encoded cloud access policy token. Example:

Authorization=Basic MTIzNDU6Z2xjX0FCQ0RFRkFHRkk= 
Note: You can encode using this command on linux: echo -n "12345:glc_ABCDEFGHIJ1234567890" | base64
# produces e.g. MTIzNDU6Z2xjX0FCQ0RFRkFHRkk=

Step B: Pipeline Setup (The "Forwarder")

In the Apica "Flow" or "Pipeline" section, you will create a rule to route specific filtered data to this new destination.

1. Select Source: Choose the incoming OTel data or system logs you want to forward.

2. Apply Filters: (Optional) Use Apica's filtering to drop noisy metrics or sensitive log data to save on Grafana Cloud costs.

3. Select Destination: Choose the OTLP/Grafana Labs target created in Step A.

Otel Forwarder: