The following is a quick guide on how to run an OpenTelemetry Collector with a custom config to forward traces to Langtrace either self-hosted or on Cloud.

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Collector Configuration

Save the following to a file named otel.yaml and replace <LANGTRACE_API_KEY> with your Langtrace API key. If you are using a self-hosted setup, you will need to log in as an admin user first to create a project and generate an API key.

receivers:
  otlp:
    protocols:
      http:
        include_metadata: true
        endpoint: 0.0.0.0:4318

exporters:
  otlphttp:
    encoding: json
    compression: none
    traces_endpoint: "https://app.langtrace.ai/api/trace"
    tls:
      insecure: false
    headers:
      x-api-key: "<LANGTRACE_API_KEY>"
      Content-Type: "application/json"

service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers:
        - otlp
      exporters:
        - otlphttp

The Langtrace client processes only JSON-encoded data. Please make sure to use an exporter that can encode the data in json format and does not use any compression.

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Important Configuration Notes

  • endpoint: Change the endpoint in the otlphttp exporter section to https://SELF_HOSTED_URL/api/trace if you are sending your traces to self hosted Langtrace backend. For example, for localhost, the endpoint would be http://localhost:3000/api/trace. If you are running the collector along with the Langtrace’s docker compose setup, the endpoint would be http://langtrace:3000/api/trace i.e. the name of the Langtrace client container name specified in the docker compose file.
  • x-api-key: The value of x-api-key should be the API key generated for your specific Langtrace project.

You can add debug as an exporter to the config if you wish to debug the working of the collector.

  exporters:
    debug:
      verbosity: detailed

and append the debug exporter to the traces pipeline.

  service:
    pipelines:
      traces:
        exporters:
          - debug

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Docker Compose Configuration

The following is a sample docker-compose.yaml file that runs the OpenTelemetry Collector with a custom configuration file. The configuration file is mounted as a volume in the container. Use this as a reference to run the OpenTelemetry Collector with a custom configuration file.

version: "3"
services:
  otel-collector:
    image: otel/opentelemetry-collector-contrib
    volumes:
      - ./otel.yaml:/etc/otelcol-contrib/config.yaml
    ports:
      - 1888:1888 # pprof extension
      - 8888:8888 # Prometheus metrics exposed by the Collector
      - 8889:8889 # Prometheus exporter metrics
      - 13133:13133 # health_check extension
      - 4317:4317 # OTLP gRPC receiver
      - 4318:4318 # OTLP HTTP receiver
      - 55679:55679 # zpages extension
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