OTel direct ingestion

You can configure any OTel receiver to send telemetry data directly to SolarWinds Observability. When OpenTelemetry data is ingested directly from the receiver, entities are not created in SolarWinds Observability. The ingested data is available in the Metrics Explorer and Logs Explorer, and can be added to custom dashboards. Alerts can also be created based on the telemetry data that is received.

Add your OTel receiver

To add your receiver for direct OTel ingestion, do the following:

1. Install the OpenTelemetry Collector Contrib from the open-telemetry / opentelemetry-collector-releases GitHub release page.

2. Create a config.yaml file that contains the correct configuration options for your receivers, processors, exporters, and service. Include the following otlp configuration in the exporters section, replacing:

   • otel.collector.xx-yy.cloud.solarwinds.com with the correct endpoint for your organization. See Data centers and endpoint URIs.
   • ABC123abcABC123abcABC123abcABC123abcABC123abcABC123abcABC123abcABC123ab with your SolarWinds Observability API token. See API Tokens.

   otlp:
     endpoint: "otel.collector.xx-yy.cloud.solarwinds.com:443"
     tls:
       insecure: false
     headers: {"authorization": "Bearer ABC123abcABC123abcABC123abcABC123abcABC123abcABC123abcABC123abcABC123ab"}

3. Run the collector from the directory where the config.yaml was created. For example, the following command should work for a standard install:

   otelcol-contrib --config=config.yaml

4. The output from the above command should indicate that OTel collector is running and the metrics and logs are pushed to SolarWinds Observability.

Remove your OTel receiver

To stop sending telemetry data to SolarWinds Observability:

1. Stop the OTel receiver.
2. Remove the otlp configuration that was added to the exporters section of the config.yaml file.