opentelemetry-exporter-otlp-grpc

The opentelemetry-exporter-otlp-grpc gem provides an OTLP exporter over GRPC for OpenTelemetry for Ruby. Using opentelemetry-exporter-otlp-grpc, an application can configure OpenTelemetry to export collected tracing data to the OpenTelemetry Collector.

What is OpenTelemetry?

OpenTelemetry is an open source observability framework, providing a general-purpose API, SDK, and related tools required for the instrumentation of cloud-native software, frameworks, and libraries.

OpenTelemetry provides a single set of APIs, libraries, agents, and collector services to capture distributed traces and metrics from your application. You can analyze them using Prometheus, Jaeger, and other observability tools.

How does this gem fit in?

The opentelemetry-exporter-otlp-grpc gem is a plugin that provides OTLP export. To export to the OpenTelemetry Collector, an application can include this gem along with opentelemetry-sdk, and configure the SDK to use the provided OTLP exporter as a span processor.

Generally, libraries that produce telemetry data should avoid depending directly on specific exporter, deferring that choice to the application developer.

Supported protocol version

This gem supports the v0.11.0 release of OTLP.

How do I get started?

Install the gem using:

gem install opentelemetry-sdk
gem install opentelemetry-exporter-otlp-grpc

Or, if you use bundler, include opentelemetry-sdk in your Gemfile.

Then, configure the SDK to use the OTLP GRPC exporter as a span processor, and use the OpenTelemetry interfaces to produces traces and other information. Following is a basic example.

require 'opentelemetry/sdk'
require 'opentelemetry/exporter/otlp/grpc'

exporter = OpenTelemetry::Exporter::OTLP::GRPC::TraceExporter.new
span_processor = OpenTelemetry::SDK::Trace::Export::BatchSpanProcessor.new(exporter)

OpenTelemetry::SDK.configure do |c|
  c.add_span_processor(span_processor)
end

# To start a trace you need to get a Tracer from the TracerProvider
tracer = OpenTelemetry.tracer_provider.tracer('my_app_or_gem', '0.1.0')

# create a span
tracer.in_span('foo') do |span|
  # set an attribute
  span.set_attribute('platform', 'osx')
  # add an event
  span.add_event('event in bar')
  # create bar as child of foo
  tracer.in_span('bar') do |child_span|
    # inspect the span
    pp child_span
  end
end

For additional examples, see the examples on github.

How can I configure the OTLP exporter?

The collector exporter can be configured explicitly in code, or via environment variables as shown above. The configuration parameters, environment variables, and defaults are shown below.

Parameter	Environment variable	Default
`endpoint:`	`OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT`	`"http://localhost:4318/v1/traces"`
`certificate_file:`	`OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_CERTIFICATE`
`client_certificate_file`	`OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_CLIENT_CERTIFICATE`
`client_key_file`	`OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_CLIENT_KEY`

How can I get involved?

The opentelemetry-exporter-otlp-grpc gem source is on github, along with related gems including opentelemetry-sdk.

The OpenTelemetry Ruby gems are maintained by the OpenTelemetry-Ruby special interest group (SIG). You can get involved by joining us in GitHub Discussions or attending our weekly meeting. See the meeting calendar for dates and times. For more information on this and other language SIGs, see the OpenTelemetry community page.

License

The opentelemetry-exporter-otlp-grpc gem is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. See LICENSE for more information.