Monitor with OTel
OpenTelemetry (OTel) provides an open-sourced, standardized, and vendor-neutral way to collect telemetry data from distributed applications. OTel APIs, libraries, and distributions can be used to instrument applications, services, and infrastructure components to capture metrics, traces, and logs.
As an OTel vendor, SolarWinds Observability natively supports OTel with full OTel-based integrations, direct ingestion of OTel data, and APM instrumentation libraries built using OTel as its primary instrumentation framework.
OTel integrations in SolarWinds Observability use OTel receivers from opentelemetry-collector-contrib. You can also use Telegraf-based integrations for monitoring, or configure Telegraf manually to submit data in OTel format. See Monitor with Telegraf.
For OTel integrations monitored with the SolarWinds Observability Agent, a proxy can be used to forward connections to SolarWinds Observability endpoints for environments that restrict communication with the SolarWinds Observability endpoints. See Proxy configuration.
Full OTel-based integrations
There are several OTel-based integrations available to ingest data from your platforms and services. An entity is created when you integrate with one of the following platforms or services, allowing for full observability of your monitored platform.
Full OTel-based integrations rely on the SolarWinds Observability Agent to collect and send OTel data. See Configure native OTel integrations.
Deploy the SolarWinds Observability Agent with a Docker image to configure an integration on a Kubernetes cluster.
OTel-based integrations without an entity
The following OTel-based integrations ingest data from your platforms and services but do not create an entity.
Many collected metrics are displayed as widgets in pre-built system dashboards specific for the integration. In Dashboards, search for an integration name and click the integration system dashboard.
To see the metrics in the Metrics Explorer, type the metric name in Metrics Explorer search box.
Use the SolarWinds Observability Agent to configure the following native OTel-based integrations:
- Elasticsearch integration
- Confluent Cloud integration
- Kafka integration
- Memcached integration
- OTLP integration
- Oracle DB integration
- Prometheus integration
- RabbitMQ integration
- Redis integration
- ZooKeeper integration
The following integrations do not rely on the SolarWinds Observability Agent and include some OTel-based integrations:
Direct ingestion of OTel data
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. However, the ingested data is available in the Metrics Explorer and Logs Explorer, and can be added to custom dashboards.
OTel-based APM instrumentation libraries
Python and Java libraries are OTel Custom Distributions that support the standard OTel tracing API. These libraries have the same instrumentation coverage as the standard OTel SDKs for tracing. The libraries include custom components that add functionality and integrate fully with SolarWinds Observability, such as manual trace creation, auto-instrumentation of common Python frameworks, setting custom transaction names, or checking if the library is ready.
In the spirit of collaboration and innovation, SolarWinds added the Python Library to the open-source community.