OpenTelemetry

Note: The OpenTelemetry support in Instana is in public beta. We are hard at work to make OpenTelemetry a first-class citizen in Instana.

Using the host agent as a proxy, OpenTelemetry implementations can send tracing and metric data to the Instana agent. The data is then sent to the Instana back end for processing.

Activating OpenTelemetry Support

The OpenTelemetry ingestion in the host agent is deactivated by default to not interfere with other collectors on the host. To enable the reception of OpenTelemetry data in the host agent, add the following snippet to your host agent's configuration.yaml:

com.instana.plugin.opentelemetry:
  enabled: <boolean>   # legacy setting, will only enable grpc, defaults to false
  grpc:
    enabled: <boolean> # takes precedence over legacy settings above, defaults to true if "grpc:" is present
  http:
    enabled: <boolean> # allows to enable http endpoints, defaults to true if "http:" is present

After the configuration is activated, the host agent will activate a collector for OpenTelemetry's default OTLP (OpenTelemetry protocol) exporter on port 4317 for gRPC and on port 4318 for HTTP or HTTPS connections.

TLS Encryption for OpenTelemetry Ingestion

TLS encryption can be enabled on the Agent, so that all data send to the OpenTelemetry ingestion endpoint is TLS encrypted as well. See Enabling TLS Encryption for more information on how to set this up.

OpenTelemetry Logs

Collection of OpenTelemetry logs is not supported. The host agent will show some benign exceptions if it receives OpenTelemetry logs data.

OpenTelemetry Metrics

OpenTelemetry metrics appear as "OpenTelemetry Custom Metrics" associated with the host or with the process from where they are collected. You can query OpenTelemetry custom metrics using the "Dynamic Focus" and "Event & Alerts" with entity.type:opentelemetry or entity.type:otel.

The sensor collects the as follows core metrics:

OpenTelemetry Tracing

Note: We are hard at work to make OpenTelemetry a first-class citizen with full interoperability with Instana's own AutoTrace technology!

Current Scope

Using OpenTelemetry with Other Trace Protocols

OpenTelemetry supports exporters others than its native otlp, like Zipkin and Jaeger, as well as matching context-propagators. When using Jaeger or Zipkin exporters, the host agent will be able to ingest the data and process them the same as with other Zipkin and Jaeger implementations; refer to the Zipkin documentation and Jaeger documentation, respectively.

Known Limitations

Infrastructure Correlation

For detailed information on infrastructure correlation on Linux hosts, see the documentation on the agent's HTTP API endpoint.

Note: The optional Instana Agent Service provided on Kubernetes via the Instana Agent Helm Chart is very useful in combination with the OpenTelemetry support. It ensures that the data is forwarded to the Instana Agent which runs on the same Kubernetes node. This allows the Instana Agent to populate the infrastructure correlation data correctly.

Additional Components

The OpenTelemetry specification defines a number of components and APIs for customization. Instana provides some of these components for different runtimes. These components can be added to an application that is monitored by OpenTelemetry. All of these are optional, they are not required for Instana's OpenTelemetry support.

OpenTelemetry Exporters

OpenTelemetry exporters are used to export data from the application under monitoring to an OpenTelemetry collector or back end. An Instana OpenTelemetry exporter converts the tracing data that is produced by OpenTelemetry instrumentations, converts it to the Instana format and sends it to an endpoint that processes Instana tracing data.

Note: The more common alternative approach to using an Instana OpenTelemetry exporter is to use the default OpenTelemetry protocol exporter (provided by the OpenTelemetry project) in the monitored application. This exporter only needs to be configured to send its data to Instana in the OpenTelemetry format. For more information, see Activating OpenTelemetry Support.

Available Instana OpenTelemetry Exporters

OpenTelemetry Propagators

Propagators translate between vendor-specific trace correlation headers and the OpenTelemetry trace context. If an incoming HTTP request contains the proprietary Instana trace correlation headers (X-INSTANA-T and X-INSTANA-S), the Instana OpenTelemetry propagator creates an OpenTelemetry trace context with the trace ID and span ID from those headers. The OpenTelemetry tracer can continue the trace from that trace context. Also, if an OpenTelemetry trace context exists, the Instana OpenTelemetry propagator will use it to inject the proprietary Instana trace correlation headers into outgoing requests.

Note: Instana tracers support the W3C trace context specification, which is the default correlation header format used by OpenTelemetry. Therefore you usually don't need to add an Instana OpenTelemetry propagator to your application. For more information about the exact level of support, see W3C Trace Context Support.

Available Instana OpenTelemetry Propagators

OpenTelemetry Samplers

An OpenTelemetry sampler makes a sampling decision, that is, it decides whether tracing data is captured for a particular request or not. Instana OpenTelemetry samplers make this decision based on the sampled flag of the trace context. If the value of the sampled flag is not false, the sampler will decide to capture the request.

Available Instana OpenTelemetry Samplers

OpenTelemetry Resource Detectors

Note: An Instana OpenTelemetry resource detector always requires an Instana agent to be deployed and running on the same host.

Instana OpenTelemetry resource detectors enrich OpenTelemetry tracing information with additional resource attributes. The additional attributes help to establish a link between the OpenTelemetry tracing data and the process infrastructure entities in Instana.

The following fields are attached to the resource:

Available Instana OpenTelemetry Resource Detectors