Exporters

In order to visualize and analyze your telemetry, you will need to export your data to an OpenTelemetry Collector or a backend such as Jaeger, Zipkin, Prometheus or a vendor-specific one.

As part of OpenTelemetry Rust you will find many exporters being available. Among them, the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) exporters provide the best experience for you as an end-user, since it is a general-purpose telemetry data delivery protocol designed in the scope of the OpenTelemetry project.

To learn more about the OTLP protocol, you can read the OTLP Specification.

Below you will find some introductions on how to set up exporters for OTLP and other common protocols in your code.

OTLP endpoint

To send trace data to a OTLP endpoint (like the collector or Jaeger) you’ll want to use an exporter crate, such as opentelemetry_otlp:

[dependencies]
opentelemetry-otlp = { version = "0.13", features = ["default"] }

Next, configure the exporter to point at an OTLP endpoint. For example you can update init_tracer in dice_server.rs from the Getting Started like the following:

fn init_tracer() {
    match SpanExporter::new_tonic(ExportConfig::default(), TonicConfig::default()) {
        Ok(exporter) => {
            global::set_text_map_propagator(TraceContextPropagator::new());
            let provider = TracerProvider::builder()
                .with_simple_exporter(exporter)
                .build();
            global::set_tracer_provider(provider);
        },
        Err(why) => panic!("{:?}", why)
    }

}

To try out the OTLPTraceExporter quickly, you can run Jaeger in a docker container:

docker run -d --name jaeger \
  -e COLLECTOR_ZIPKIN_HOST_PORT=:9411 \
  -e COLLECTOR_OTLP_ENABLED=true \
  -p 6831:6831/udp \
  -p 6832:6832/udp \
  -p 5778:5778 \
  -p 16686:16686 \
  -p 4317:4317 \
  -p 4318:4318 \
  -p 14250:14250 \
  -p 14268:14268 \
  -p 14269:14269 \
  -p 9411:9411 \
  jaegertracing/all-in-one:latest