OpenTelemetry

Overview

OpenTelemetry is a collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs. Use it to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces) to help analyze software’s performance and behavior.

We recommend using the OpenTelemetry HTTP exporter to send logs, metrics and traces to Apica Ascent.

OTLP Http exporter

otlphttp:
    endpoint: https://<your ascent endpoint>
    encoding: json
    compression: gzip
    headers:
      Authorization: "Bearer <token string goes here>"
    tls:
      insecure: false
      insecure_skip_verify: true

Encoding type must be JSON for logs and traces. We currently only support protobuf encoding for metrics. When using metrics_endpoint with proto encoding, remove the compression setting.

Apica telemetry pipeline only supports data for metrics in OTLP format. Sending data to the prometheus remote write endpoint will not allow manipulation of metrics via the telemetry pipeline

Prometheus remote write exporter

Prometheus Remote Write Exporter can be used to send OpenTelemetry metrics to Prometheus remote write compatible backends

Apica Ascent implements a Prometheus remote write backend so metric data from open telemetry collectors can be sent to Apica Ascent with a simple configuration as described below.

Enable the prometheusremorewrite exporter in your open telemetry configuration yaml

exporters:
  prometheusremotewrite:

Specify the Apica Ascent cluster endpoint to send the remote write data. Apica Ascent implements automatic retention tiering to object storage for all your opentelemetry metrics data giving you infinite retention and scale with zero storage overheads as your metrics needs grow.

endpoint: "https://<apica-ascent-endpoint>/v1/receive/prometheus"

The endpoint is authenticated and requires bearer token to be sent as part of the request

headers:
  Authorization: "Bearer <token string goes here"  

Here's a full configuration example below with TLS enabled.

if you are using OpenTelemetry on AWS, remove the "wal:" section below

exporters:
  prometheusremotewrite:
    endpoint: "https://<apica-ascent-endpoint>/v1/receive/prometheus"
    headers:
      Authorization: "Bearer <token string goes here>"
    wal: # Enabling the Write-Ahead-Log for the exporter.
      directory: ./prom_rw # The directory to store the WAL in
      buffer_size: 100 # Optional count of elements to be read from the WAL before truncating; default of 300
      truncate_frequency: 45s # Optional frequency for how often the WAL should be truncated. It is a time.ParseDuration; default of 1m
    tls: 
      ca_file: <file-name>
      cert_file: <file-name>
      key_file: <file-name>

    external_labels: #labels to identify the metric
         label1: value1

receivers:
  otlp:
    protocols:
      grpc:
      http:

processors:
  batch:

service:
  pipelines:
    metrics:
         receivers: [otlp]
         processors: [batch]
         exporters: [prometheusremotewrite]

Scraping Prometheus Metrics

In the OpenTelemetry config file, you can include a scrape section to scrape data from Prometheus endpoints. You can subsequently push that to a remote Prometheus compatible write endpoint using instructions from the section above.

receivers:
  prometheus:
      config:
        scrape_configs:
        - job_name: 'otel-collector'
          scrape_interval: 10s
          static_configs:
          - targets: ['0.0.0.0:8888']

service:
  pipelines:
    metrics:
         receivers: [prometheus]          

Language Integrations

Java

If you are writing a Java-based application and want to enable OpenTelemetry for instrumenting your application logs, traces, and metrics, you can use the OpenTelemetry Java agent Jar file to attach to your existing Java applications.

The Jar file can be found here - https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-java-instrumentation#about

the Prometheus metrics options create a pull metric instance that should be scraped by an external Prometheus compatible instance

JAVA_OPTS	Value	Notes
otel.service_name	<User defined>	Give a service name to group your OpenTelemetry data traces under this service name
otel.traces.exporter	otlp
otel.exporter.otlp.endpoint	https://<Apica Ascent ENDPOINT>	Apica Ascent OpenTelemetry endpoint
javaagent	<PATH TO JAR>/opentelemetry-javaagent.jar	OpenTelemetry agent Jar file
otel.metrics.exporter	prometheus
otel.exporter.prometheus.port		Default port is 9464
otel.exporter.prometheus.host		Default is 0.0.0.0

$> java -javaagent:opentelemetry-javaagent.jar -Dotel.exporter.otlp.certificate=./ca.crt -Dotel.traces.exporter=otlp -Dotel.exporter.otlp.endpoint=https://$APICA_ASCENT_SERVER -Dotel.metrics.exporter=none -Dotel.service-name=java-petclinic-sample-app -Dotel.exporter.logging.prefix -jar -Djava.util.logging.config.file=logging.properties target/spring-petclinic-2.7.0-SNAPSHOT.jar --server.port=8080

When using TLS please ensure you have the CA cert of the Apica Ascent environment installed in the JVM Cert store. Instructions can be found here - https://connect2id.com/blog/importing-ca-root-cert-into-jvm-trust-store

Example Petclinic app with open telemetry integration

You can use our freely available petclinc java application for opentelmetry integration testing. Just launch our free container as below and point it to the Apica service IP/DNS

docker run -d -p 8080:8080 -e BACKEND_HOST={apica_host}.apica.io -e BACKEND_SCHEME=https -e API_TOKEN="{Apica_Ingest_Token}" apica/petclinic-open-telemetry:v1.0