OpenTelemetry Collector

This page introduces the OpenTelemetry Collector and describes how it is used by Splunk AppDynamics.

The OpenTelemetry Collector is a vendor-agnostic data collection pipeline that receives, processes, and exports telemetry data. It acts as the service pipeline by gathering telemetry data from your applications and exporting to a backend. It can be used to collect and send distributed traces to the Cisco Cloud Observability backend. 

Because the OpenTelemetry Collector can perform data transporting and processing tasks such as retries, authentication, batching, encryption, and sensitive data filtering, instrumentation libraries can communicate with the OpenTelemetry Collector instead of communicating directly with the backend. This enables instrumentation libraries to offload data quickly and reduces the burden on the applications that they are running with.

This document contains references to third-party documentation. Splunk AppDynamics does not own any rights and assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of such third-party documentation.

OpenTelemetry Collector Components

The OpenTelemetry Collector is extensible and highly configurable. A customized OpenTelemetry Collector can be built by using a combination of the following components:

• Receivers: Receives the data from OpenTelemetry™ sources, such as tracers and SDKs.
• Processors: Obtains data from receivers and processes it.
• Exporters: Obtains the data from processors and sends it to one or more backends.
• Extensions: Used for tasks that do not involve processing telemetry data, such as health checks and authentication.

These components are provided by the open-source community and can also be created by users. For more information on OpenTelemetry Collector components, see Configuration.

How Splunk AppDynamics Uses the OpenTelemetry Collector

Splunk AppDynamics uses the OpenTelemetry Collector for various operations, including:

• Performing OAuth2 authentication to ingest OpenTelemetry data in Cisco Cloud Observability. Because most OpenTelemetry instrumentation libraries do not support OAuth2, they must send data to the OpenTelemetry Collector to communicate with Cisco Cloud Observability.
• Batching requests to prevent users from exceeding the ingestion rate limit set by Cisco Cloud Observability. The ingestion rate limit depends on your tier, and you can configure the batch/traces, batch/metrics, and batch/logs processors according to your limit. 
• Data collection and annotation, such as:
  • Collecting Prometheus infrastructure metrics (optional).
  • Collecting Host logs (optional).
  • Annotating Kubernetes resource attributes to enable Kubernetes infrastructure correlation.
  • Filtering sensitive data.

Compatible OpenTelemetry Collector Distributions

The following distributions of the OpenTelemetry Collector can be used with Cisco Cloud Observability:

• Cisco AppDynamics Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector
• Open-Source OpenTelemetry Collector
  • Pre-built contribution distribution released by the OpenTelemetry community
  • Custom collector with mandatory components

Splunk AppDynamics recommends using the Cisco AppDynamics Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector with Splunk AppDynamics products.

OpenTelemetry™ is a trademark of The Linux Foundation®.