Integrating with OpenTelemetry logs

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To ingest OpenTelemetry logs into Instana, you need an add-on to the Instana license. Contact your IBM Sales representative to purchase the add-on.

If the host agent receives the OpenTelemetry log data, it shows some minor exceptions. The OpenTelemetry logs are ingested to the Instana backend by using the following ways:

  1. Send logs to the Instana backend otlp-acceptor directly with the OTLP protocol or through the OpenTelemetry Collector.

  2. Ingest logs with the Instana agent that collects the data for Instana.

    OpenTelemetry log Ingestion to Instana

Opentelemetry logs data model

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In OpenTelemetry, a log record consists of the following fields:

Field name Description
Timestamp Time when the event occurred.
ObservedTimestamp Time when the event was observed.
TraceId Request trace ID.
SpanId Request span ID.
TraceFlags W3C trace flag.
SeverityText Severity text or log level.
SeverityNumber Numerical value of the severity.
Body Body of the log record.
Resource Describes the source of the log.
InstrumentationScope Describes the group of metrics, traces, or log records in the same feature or part of the resource that emitted the log.
Attributes Additional information about the event.

Source: OpenTelemetry Log Record Definition

The following fields are used to transform OpenTelemetry log data for Instana:

  • The TraceId, SpanId, and Body fields are incorporated without any alterations.
  • The Timestamp field that is considered for logging is the timestamp during the ingestion of log records into Instana.
  • The log level is determined primarily by the SeverityText field and the SeverityNumber field as a fallback. If no log level can be identified from the SeverityText and SeverityNumber fields, then the log level is set to UNKNOWN.
  • The Resource field is used to identify the entity, I/O stream, and host information associated with the log.
  • The Attributes are supported as key-value pairs through the Custom Tags from Instana.
  • The exception attributes exception.type, exception.message, and exception.stacktrace in the Attributes field are also supported in Instana.

However, the host information is mandatory for the Resource attribute to accept any OpenTelemetry logs in Instana.