OpenTelemetry integration

Elastic’s OpenTelemetry integration allows you to reuse your existing OpenTelemetry instrumentation to quickly analyze distributed traces and metrics with the Elastic Stack.

OpenTelemetry is an open-source project that provides the components necessary to observe your applications and services. If you’re unfamiliar with the project, see the spec for more information.

Elastic’s integration is designed to drop into your current OpenTelemetry setup. We’ve done this by extending the "contrib" OpenTelemetry collector and adding an Elastic exporter. This exporter translates the OpenTelemetry trace data collected from your services to Elastic’s protocol, before sending the data to the Elastic Stack. By extending the OpenTelemetry collector, no changes are needed in your instrumented services in order to begin using the Elastic Stack.

The OpenTelemetry collector uses three different types of components to handle data: receivers, processors, and exporters.

Once a receiver, processor, and exporter is defined, pipelines can be configured in the services section of your configuration. Specifically, a traces pipeline will define the path of trace data through your collector, and bring all three of these components together.

A final note: extensions can also be enabled for tasks like monitoring your collectors health. See the OpenTelemetry extension readme for a list of supported extensions.