Hands-On OpenTelemetry, Docker, and K8s

Deploy the OpenTelemetry Collector

10 minutes

Uninstall the OpenTelemetry Collector

Our EC2 instance may already have an older version the Splunk Distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector installed. Before proceeding further, let’s uninstall it using the following command:

bash 
curl -sSL https://dl.signalfx.com/splunk-otel-collector.sh > /tmp/splunk-otel-collector.sh;
sudo sh /tmp/splunk-otel-collector.sh --uninstall

Deploy the OpenTelemetry Collector

Let’s deploy the latest version of the Splunk Distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector on our Linux EC2 instance.

We can do this by downloading the collector binary using curl, and then running it
with specific arguments that tell the collector which realm to report data into, which access token to use, and which deployment environment to report into.

A deployment environment in Splunk Observability Cloud is a distinct deployment of your system or application that allows you to set up configurations that don’t overlap with configurations in other deployments of the same application.

bash 
curl -sSL https://dl.signalfx.com/splunk-otel-collector.sh > /tmp/splunk-otel-collector.sh; \
sudo sh /tmp/splunk-otel-collector.sh \
--realm $REALM \
--mode agent \
--without-instrumentation \
--deployment-environment otel-$INSTANCE \
-- $ACCESS_TOKEN

Refer to Install the Collector for Linux with the installer script for further details on how to install the collector.

Confirm the Collector is Running

Let’s confirm that the collector is running successfully on our instance.

Press Ctrl + C to exit out of the status command.

bash 
sudo systemctl status splunk-otel-collector

How do we view the collector logs?

We can view the collector logs using journalctl:

Press Ctrl + C to exit out of tailing the log.

bash 
sudo journalctl -u splunk-otel-collector -f -n 100

Collector Configuration

Where do we find the configuration that is used by this collector?

It’s available in the /etc/otel/collector directory. Since we installed the collector in agent mode, the collector configuration can be found in the agent_config.yaml file.

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