SolarWinds OpenTelemetry Collector

SolarWinds OpenTelemetry Collector (swotelcol) is a distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector with components bundled from opentelemetry-collector, opentelemetry-collector-contrib and solarwinds-otel-collector-contrib. It contains SolarWinds-specific components for better integration with SolarWinds Observability (SWO) and enhances telemetry collection.

Getting Started

You will need to generate your ingestion token in SWO. See API Tokens. Put it in the SOLARWINDS_TOKEN environment variable.

# Unix shell
export SOLARWINDS_TOKEN="<your-ingestion-token>"

# PowerShell
$env:SOLARWINDS_TOKEN="<your-ingestion-token>"

Then you can either use the provided example configurations or create your own custom configuration from scratch.

Fully supported integrations

In the examples folder, there are a number of configurations for various fully supported integrations.

When these integrations are configured, you will get the same experience as with integrations set up by the Add Data wizards in SWO.

Just follow the inline comments within the example configurations for guidance.

Custom configuration

You can also create your own custom configuration.

To get data correctly ingested by the SWO the configuration has to contain these components:

• SolarWinds Extension - Provides basic collector identification and health check for SWO.
• SolarWinds Processor - Enriches telemetry data with attributes to be properly associated by SWO.
• OTLP Exporter - Exports telemetry data to SWO.

Create a config.yaml file that contains configuration for the swotelcol.

1. Set ingestion endpoint. To get correct endpoint, search for OTLP in Data centers and endpoint URIs docs.
2. Specify the collector name.

service:
  extensions: [solarwinds]
  pipelines:
    metrics:
      receivers: [redis]
      exporters: [otlp]

receivers:
  redis:
    endpoint: "<redis-url>:6379"
    collection_interval: 10s
    password: ${env:REDIS_PASSWORD}

extensions:
  solarwinds:
    collector_name: "<collector-name>" # Required parameter
    grpc: &grpc_settings
      endpoint: "<endpoint>" # Required parameter
      tls:
        insecure: false
      headers: { "Authorization": "Bearer ${env:SOLARWINDS_TOKEN}" }

exporters:
  otlp:
    <<: *grpc_settings

Running the Collector

1. Pull the swotelcol image from DockerHub (Verified distribution in this case).

docker pull solarwinds/solarwinds-otel-collector:verified

2. Start the container with your config.yaml.

docker run -v ./config.yaml:/opt/default-config.yaml solarwinds/solarwinds-otel-collector:verified

Distributions

Verified

The verified distribution contains only the components listed below. With the verified distribution, you will receive support with configuration, and the components have been tested by Solarwinds.

Receivers	Processors	Exporters	Extensions	Connectors
apachereceiver	memorylimiterprocessor	debugexporter	filestorage	forwardconnector
prometheusreceiver	resourceprocessor	nopexporter	memorylimiterextension	routingconnector
dockerstatsreceiver	resourcedetectionprocessor	otlpexporter	healthcheckextension	solarwindsentityconnector
elasticsearchreceiver	metricstransformprocessor	fileexporter	k8sobserver
iisreceiver	cumulativetodeltaprocessor		solarwindsapmsettingsextension
memcachedreceiver	deltatorate		solarwindsextension
nginxreceiver	metricsgenerationprocessor
oracledbreceiver	transformprocessor
otlpreceiver	filterprocessor
rabbitmqreceiver	batchprocessor
redisreceiver	attributesprocessor
snowflakereceiver	deltatocumulativeprocessor
zookeeperreceiver	deltatorateprocessor
nopreceiver	groupbyattrsprocessor
filelogreceiver	groupbytraceprocessor
haproxyreceiver	k8sattributesprocessor
hostmetricsreceiver	k8seventgenerationprocessor
journaldreceiver	solarwindsprocessor
k8seventsreceiver	swok8sworkloadtypeprocessor
k8sobjectsreceiver	swok8sworkloadstatusprocessor
kafkareceiver
receivercreator
simpleprometheusreceiver
statsdreceiver
swohostmetricsreceiver
swok8sobjectsreceiver
mqttreceiver

Playground

The playground distribution contains all components from verified distribution plus most of the components from opentelemetry-collector-contrib and opentelemetry-collector repositories. When using the playground distribution, we will not provide support with configuration. Also we cannot guaratee that all components from the mentioned repositories are working as expected.

K8s

The k8s distribution contains only the components required for the Kubernetes monitoring in Solarwinds Obervability platform.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.