Getting Started

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, read the introduction.

The following tutorial shows how to deploy the OpenTelemetry Collector and send telemetry to it using the default configuration and the telemetrygen utility.

Prerequisites

To follow this tutorial you need the following

• Go 1.20 or higher

Test the OpenTelemetry Collector in five minutes

1. Pull the OpenTelemetry Collector Docker image and run the collector in a container:

   docker pull otel/opentelemetry-collector:0.88.0
   docker run -p 127.0.0.1:4317:4317 -p 127.0.0.1:55679:55679 otel/opentelemetry-collector:0.88.0
   

2. Download and install the telemetrygen utility from the opentelemetry-collector-contrib repository:

   go install github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/cmd/telemetrygen@latest
   

   The command should install telemetrygen inside the local go/bin directory.

3. The telemetrygen command generates dummy telemetry for testing. In a new terminal window, send some traces to the collector:

   telemetrygen traces --otlp-insecure --duration 5s
   

   After five seconds, telemetrygen stops and shows the sended messages in the console:

   2023-10-23T12:58:19.835+0200	INFO	traces/worker.go:88	traces generated	{"worker": 0, "traces": 994418}
   2023-10-23T12:58:19.835+0200	INFO	traces/traces.go:79	stop the batch span processor
   

   In the terminal window, running the Collector container, logs should show activity related to the trace ingest similar to this:

   Span #434
      Trace ID       : ba7ef95fce7499811ca72158350c907c
      Parent ID      : 1d3c9f49b3f2cf47
      ID             : 7609079dc6253034
      Name           : okey-dokey
      Kind           : Server
      Start time     : 2023-10-23 11:01:29.53251 +0000 UTC
      End time       : 2023-10-23 11:01:29.532634 +0000 UTC
      Status code    : Unset
      Status message :
   

4. Open http://localhost:55679/debug/tracez in your browser and select one of the samples in the table to see the traces you’ve just generated.

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)