Exporters

Send telemetry to the OpenTelemetry Collector to make sure it’s exported correctly. Using the Collector in production environments is a best practice. To visualize your telemetry, export it to a backend such as Jaeger, Zipkin, Prometheus, or a vendor-specific backend.

Available exporters

The registry contains a list of exporters for Go.

Among exporters, OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) exporters are designed with the OpenTelemetry data model in mind, emitting OTel data without any loss of information. Furthermore, many tools that operate on telemetry data support OTLP (such as Prometheus, Jaeger, and most vendors), providing you with a high degree of flexibility when you need it. To learn more about OTLP, see OTLP Specification.

This page covers the main OpenTelemetry Go exporters and how to set them up.

Automatic Exporter Configuration with Environment Variables

You can use the go.opentelemetry.io/contrib/exporters/autoexport package to automatically configure exporters using standard OpenTelemetry environment variables.

This package provides factory functions that read the exporter selector environment variables to select and initialize the appropriate exporter at runtime:

Supported values for the selector variables are otlp (default) and none. For OTEL_METRICS_EXPORTER, prometheus is also supported. Once an exporter is selected, its configuration (endpoint, headers, timeout, protocol, etc.) is read from the standard OTLP exporter environment variables by the underlying OTLP exporter package.

Example usage:

import (
	"context"

	"go.opentelemetry.io/contrib/exporters/autoexport"
	sdkmetric "go.opentelemetry.io/otel/sdk/metric"
	sdktrace "go.opentelemetry.io/otel/sdk/trace"
)

func main() {
	ctx := context.Background()

	// Create trace exporter using environment variables
	spanExporter, err := autoexport.NewSpanExporter(ctx)
	if err != nil {
		// handle error
	}

	// Create trace provider with the exporter
	tracerProvider := sdktrace.NewTracerProvider(
		sdktrace.WithBatcher(spanExporter),
	)

	// Create metric reader using environment variables
	metricReader, err := autoexport.NewMetricReader(ctx)
	if err != nil {
		// handle error
	}

	// Create meter provider with the reader
	meterProvider := sdkmetric.NewMeterProvider(
		sdkmetric.WithReader(metricReader),
	)
}

For a complete overview of which environment variables are supported by the Go SDK and contrib packages, see the OpenTelemetry spec compliance matrix.

Console

The console exporter is useful for development and debugging tasks, and is the simplest to set up.

Console traces

The go.opentelemetry.io/otel/exporters/stdout/stdouttrace package contains an implementation of the console trace exporter.

Console metrics

The go.opentelemetry.io/otel/exporters/stdout/stdoutmetric package contains an implementation of the console metrics exporter.

Console logs (Experimental)

The go.opentelemetry.io/otel/exporters/stdout/stdoutlog package contains an implementation of the console log exporter.

OTLP

To send trace data to an OTLP endpoint (like the collector or Jaeger >= v1.35.0) you’ll want to configure an OTLP exporter that sends to your endpoint.

OTLP traces over HTTP

go.opentelemetry.io/otel/exporters/otlp/otlptrace/otlptracehttp contains an implementation of the OTLP trace exporter using HTTP with binary protobuf payloads.

OTLP traces over gRPC

go.opentelemetry.io/otel/exporters/otlp/otlptrace/otlptracegrpc contains an implementation of OTLP trace exporter using gRPC.

Jaeger

To try out the OTLP exporter, since v1.35.0 you can run Jaeger as an OTLP endpoint and for trace visualization in a Docker container:

docker run -d --name jaeger \
  -e COLLECTOR_OTLP_ENABLED=true \
  -p 16686:16686 \
  -p 4317:4317 \
  -p 4318:4318 \
  jaegertracing/all-in-one:latest

OTLP metrics over HTTP

go.opentelemetry.io/otel/exporters/otlp/otlpmetric/otlpmetrichttp contains an implementation of OTLP metrics exporter using HTTP with binary protobuf payloads.

OTLP metrics over gRPC

go.opentelemetry.io/otel/exporters/otlp/otlpmetric/otlpmetricgrpc contains an implementation of OTLP metrics exporter using gRPC.

OTLP logs over HTTP (Experimental)

go.opentelemetry.io/otel/exporters/otlp/otlplog/otlploghttp contains an implementation of OTLP logs exporter using HTTP with binary protobuf payloads.

OTLP logs over gRPC (Experimental)

go.opentelemetry.io/otel/exporters/otlp/otlplog/otlploggrpc contains an implementation of OTLP logs exporter using gRPC.

Prometheus (Experimental)

A Prometheus exporter is used to report metrics via Prometheus scrape HTTP endpoint.

go.opentelemetry.io/otel/exporters/prometheus contains an implementation of Prometheus metrics exporter.

To learn more on how to use the Prometheus exporter, try the prometheus example