1. Verify Agent Configuration

15 minutes

Welcome! In this section, we’ll begin with a fully functional OpenTelemetry setup that includes both an Agent and a Gateway.

We’ll start by quickly reviewing their configuration files to get familiar with the overall structure and to highlight key sections that control the telemetry pipeline.

Tip

Throughout the workshop, you’ll work with multiple terminal windows. To keep things organized, give each terminal a unique name or color. This will help you easily recognize and switch between them during the exercises.

We will refer to these terminals as: Agent, Gateway, Loadgen, and Test.

Exercise

Create your first terminal window and name it Agent. Navigate to the directory for the first exercise [WORKSHOP]/1-agent-gateway and verify that the required files have been generated:
```
cd 1-agent-gateway
ls -l
```
You should see the following files in the directory. If not, re-run the setup-workshop.sh script as described in the Pre-requisites section:
. ├── agent.yaml └── gateway.yaml

Understanding the Agent configuration

Let’s review the key components of the agent.yaml file used in this workshop. We’ve made some important additions to support metrics, traces, and logs.

Receivers

The receivers section defines how the Agent ingests telemetry data. In this setup, three types of receivers have been configured:

Host Metrics Receiver

hostmetrics:                         # Host Metrics Receiver
  collection_interval: 3600s         # Collection Interval (1hr)
  scrapers:
    cpu:                             # CPU Scraper

Collects CPU usage from the local system every hour. We’ll use this to generate example metric data.

OTLP Receiver (HTTP protocol)

otlp:                                # OTLP Receiver
  protocols:
    http:                            # Configure HTTP protocol
      endpoint: "0.0.0.0:4318"       # Endpoint to bind to

Enables the agent to receive metrics, traces, and logs over HTTP on port 4318. This is used to send data to the collector in future exercises.

FileLog Receiver

filelog/quotes:                      # Receiver Type/Name
  include: ./quotes.log              # The file to read log data from
  include_file_path: true            # Include file path in the log data
  include_file_name: false           # Exclude file name from the log data
  resource:                          # Add custom resource attributes
    com.splunk.source: ./quotes.log  # Source of the log data
    com.splunk.sourcetype: quotes    # Source type of the log data

Enables the agent to tail a local log file (quotes.log) and convert it to structured log events, enriched with metadata such as source and sourceType.

Exporters

Debug Exporter

  debug:                               # Exporter Type
    verbosity: detailed                # Enabled detailed debug output

OTLPHTTP Exporter
```
  otlphttp:                            # Exporter Type
    endpoint: "http://localhost:5318"  # Gateway OTLP endpoint  
```
The debug exporter sends data to the console for visibility and debugging during the workshop while the otlphttp exporter forwards all telemetry to the local Gateway instance.
This dual-export strategy ensures you can see the raw data locally while also sending it downstream for further processing and export.