Introduction to OpenTelemetry

This guide explains how to send data collected by OpenTelemetry Collector to the WhaTap monitoring service to build a unified observability environment.

Using the WhaTap monitoring through OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry is an open source observability framework for instrumenting, generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces). Measurement data collected through OpenTelemetry can be transmitted to the WhaTap monitoring platform to analyze the performances and behaviors of applications or services and then resolve problems.

If active applications or services are collected using the OpenTelemetry library, you can select a method to get the traces, metrics, and log data into the WhaTap monitoring platform. Highly visible observability monitoring is provided using the dashboards and analysis menus on the WhaTap monitoring platform.

OpenTelemetry agent

The OpenTelemetry agent processes and delivers to the WhaTap monitoring platform the data collected through the OTLP Exporter of OpenTelemetry Collector.

For the procedure to install and run the agent, see the following:

1. Install and run the WhaTap agent on the instance where OpenTelemetry Collector has been installed.

2. The launched whatap-otel service runs the Grpc server for OTLP Exporter.

   • The listening port is 6600 by default.

   • As in the default setting for OpenTelemetry Collector, the gzip compression setting is True.

Support Environment

The operating systems on which the OpenTelemetry agent can be installed are as follows. All of them support both the x86_64 and arm64 (aarch64) architectures.

• CentOS/Red Hat 7 or later

• Debian 8 or later

• Ubuntu 12.04 or later

• Amazon Linux

• Alpine Linux

Note

• Agent version 0.2.8 and later do not support CentOS 6.

• On arm64 (aarch64), Ubuntu 14.04 or later is supported.