OpenTelemetry Collector and Datadog Exporter

Overview

The OpenTelemetry Collector is a vendor-agnostic agent process for collecting and exporting telemetry data emitted by many processes. The Datadog Exporter for the OpenTelemetry Collector allows you to forward trace, metric, and logs data from OpenTelemetry SDKs to Datadog (without the Datadog Agent). It works with all supported languages, and you can connect OpenTelemetry trace data with application logs.

Application Instrumented Library, Cloud Integrations, and Other Monitoring Solutions (for example Prometheus) -> Datadog Exporter inside OpenTelemetry Collector -> Datadog

Using the Collector

The following documentation describes how to deploy and configure the Collector:


Out-of-the-box dashboards

Datadog provides out-of-the-box dashboards that you can copy and customize. To use Datadog’s out-of-the-box OpenTelemetry dashboards:

  1. Install the OpenTelemetry integration.

  2. Go to Dashboards > Dashboards list and search for opentelemetry:

    The Dashboards list, showing two OpenTelemetry out-of-the-box dashboards: Host Metrics and Collector Metrics.

The Host Metrics dashboard is for data collected from the host metrics receiver. The Collector Metrics dashboard is for any other types of metrics collected, depending on which metrics receiver you choose to enable.

Further reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

Collector documentationOPENTELEMETRY more more Send metrics, traces, and logs from OpenTelemetry Collector to Datadog using Datadog ExporterBLOG more more Use HiveMQ and OpenTelemetry to monitor IoT applications in DatadogBLOG more more OTLP Metrics TypesDOCUMENTATION more more