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 Rust.

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 Rust exporters and how to set them up.

OTLP endpoint

To send trace data to a OTLP endpoint (like the collector or Jaeger) you’ll want to use an exporter crate, such as opentelemetry-otlp:

[dependencies]
opentelemetry-otlp = { version = "0.14.0", features = ["default"] }

Next, configure the exporter to point at an OTLP endpoint. For example you can update init_tracer in dice_server.rs from the Getting Started like the following:

fn init_tracer() {
    match SpanExporter::new_tonic(ExportConfig::default(), TonicConfig::default()) {
        Ok(exporter) => {
            global::set_text_map_propagator(TraceContextPropagator::new());
            let provider = TracerProvider::builder()
                .with_simple_exporter(exporter)
                .build();
            global::set_tracer_provider(provider);
        },
        Err(why) => panic!("{:?}", why)
    }

}

To try out the OTLPTraceExporter quickly, you can run Jaeger in a docker container:

docker run -d --name jaeger \
  -e COLLECTOR_ZIPKIN_HOST_PORT=:9411 \
  -e COLLECTOR_OTLP_ENABLED=true \
  -p 6831:6831/udp \
  -p 6832:6832/udp \
  -p 5778:5778 \
  -p 16686:16686 \
  -p 4317:4317 \
  -p 4318:4318 \
  -p 14250:14250 \
  -p 14268:14268 \
  -p 14269:14269 \
  -p 9411:9411 \
  jaegertracing/all-in-one:latest