OpenTelemetry Collector Extensions

Health Check

Extensions are configured in the same config.yaml file that we referenced in the installation step. Let’s edit the config.yaml file and configure the extensions. Note that the pprof and zpages extensions are already configured in the default config.yaml file. For the purpose of this workshop, we will only be updating the health_check extension to expose the port on all network interfaces on which we can access the health of the collector.

sudo vi /etc/otelcol-contrib/config.yaml

extensions:
  health_check:
    endpoint: 0.0.0.0:13133

Start the collector:

otelcol-contrib --config=file:/etc/otelcol-contrib/config.yaml

This extension enables an HTTP URL that can be probed to check the status of the OpenTelemetry Collector. This extension can be used as a liveness and/or readiness probe on Kubernetes. To learn more about the curl command, check out the curl man page.

Open a new terminal session and SSH into your instance to run the following command:

curl http://localhost:13133

{"status":"Server available","upSince":"2023-04-27T10:11:22.153295874+01:00","uptime":"16m24.684476004s"}