🧑🏼‍🍳🍲 OpenTelemetry Collector Cookbook

This repository has a personal collection of OpenTelemetry Collector recipes curated by @jpkrohling.

📔 Recipes

Recipes are organized as a menu, by depth of effort:

• starters/ — quick, local, single-concept recipes
• mains/ — substantial, often Kubernetes, real-world recipes
• desserts/ — advanced showcases & niceties
• sides/ — shared building blocks reused by other recipes

Index

Recipe	Course	Signals	Runs on	Key components
log-redaction	starters	logs	local	transformprocessor
blocking-exporter	starters	traces	local	otlpexporter
own-telemetry	starters	traces, metrics	local	service::telemetry
redact-pii	starters	traces	local	transformprocessor
redact-log-body	starters	logs	local	transformprocessor (OTTL replace_pattern)
loki-receiver	starters	logs	local	lokireceiver, basicauthextension
ottl-transformations	starters	traces, logs	local	transformprocessor
remove-health-checks	starters	traces	local	tailsamplingprocessor
tail-sampling-basics	starters	traces	local	tailsamplingprocessor
span-metrics-connector	starters	traces → metrics	local	spanmetricsconnector
decompose-config	starters	traces	local	tailsamplingprocessor, ${file:}
probabilistic-sampler-logs	starters	logs	local	probabilisticsamplerprocessor, filelogreceiver
log-deduplication	starters	logs	local	logdedupprocessor
log-clustering	starters	logs	local	drainprocessor
logs-to-metrics	starters	logs → logs + metrics	local	countconnector, filterprocessor
access-logs-to-metrics	starters	logs → logs + metrics	local	signaltometricsconnector, transformprocessor
tls	starters	traces	local	otlpreceiver (TLS), otlpexporter (TLS)
auth	starters	traces	local	oidcauthextension, oauth2clientauthextension
grafana-cloud	starters	traces, logs, metrics	local	basicauthextension, ${env:}
persistent-queue	starters	traces	local	filestorage, otlpexporter
count-before-sampling	starters	traces → traces + metrics	local	countconnector, forwardconnector, tailsamplingprocessor
jaeger-remote-sampling	starters	traces	local	jaegerremotesamplingextension
tenant-routing	starters	traces	local	routingconnector
target-allocator	mains	metrics	Kubernetes	targetallocator, prometheusreceiver
client-side-load-balancing	mains	traces, logs, metrics	Kubernetes	otlpexporter (round_robin)
auto-instrumentation	mains	traces	Kubernetes	Operator Instrumentation CR
kafka-on-kubernetes	mains	traces	Kubernetes	kafkaexporter, kafkareceiver
scalable-tail-sampling	mains	traces	Kubernetes	loadbalancingexporter, tailsamplingprocessor
grafana-cloud-from-kubernetes	mains	traces, logs, metrics	Kubernetes	Secret + envFrom, basicauthextension
profiling-the-collector	mains	(collector profiles)	Kubernetes	pprofextension
sidecar-injection	mains	traces	Kubernetes	Operator, OpenTelemetryCollector (mode: sidecar)
kubernetes-cluster-telemetry	mains	metrics, logs	Kubernetes	k8sclusterreceiver, k8seventsreceiver
pod-logs-collection	mains	logs	Kubernetes	filelogreceiver (container parser), DaemonSet
tail-sampling-tasting-menu	desserts	traces	local	tailsamplingprocessor

🥢 Tools used

• Custom Collector images from my collection of distributions. Anywhere a custom image is being used, you can use contrib if you prefer.
• telemetrygen is used a lot in this repository to send telemetry data to our Collector instance
• otelcol-contrib is used as well, both in binary format for local examples, and as container image in examples using Kubernetes
• k3d is used in the Kubernetes recipes, in order to create a local Kubernetes cluster
• OpenTelemetry Operator is used in most Kubernetes recipes. See the setup instructions below
• kubens from the kubectx project

🍴 OpenTelemetry Operator

To get a working instance of the OpenTelemetry Operator, follow the official instructions from the project, but here's a quick summary of what's needed for our purposes:

k3d registry create dosedetelemetria ## note down the port, and add `k3d-dosedetelemetria` to your /etc/hosts
k3d cluster create --registry-use k3d-dosedetelemetria:40503 dosedetelemetria ## use the same port as the command above

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/latest/download/cert-manager.yaml
kubectl wait --for=condition=Available deployments/cert-manager -n cert-manager

kubectl apply -f https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-operator/releases/latest/download/opentelemetry-operator.yaml
kubectl wait --for=condition=Available deployments/opentelemetry-operator-controller-manager -n opentelemetry-operator-system

🧰 LGTM

For some recipes, we are using Grafana's LGTM stack to visualize data. You can just start the container with the LGTM stack, or install the stack in your Kubernetes cluster. It's not recommended to use this container image in production.

Container

In this example, we are opening only the Grafana and OTel Collector's HTTP port, which is sufficient for our tests.

docker run -p 3000:3000 -p 4318:4318 --rm -d grafana/otel-lgtm

Kubernetes

kubectl create ns lgtm
kubens lgtm
kubectl apply -f sides/lgtm/lgtm.yaml
kubectl wait --for=condition=Available deployments/lgtm -n lgtm

🪳 Bugs

Did you find a bug? Is a recipe confusing, or not working at all? Please open an issue. Make sure to include:

• the recipe name
• the command you used to run the recipe
• the version of the Collector you are using
• what you expected to see
• what you saw instead