Want to add Grafana as a exporter in Opentelemetry collector

[sshiv5768]

Goal

Receive telemetry data from the simple flask app to opentelemetry collector and send it to Grafana.

Approach

• Created a demo flask app.
• Getting telemetry data to Otel-Collector container
• Running Grafana container
• Added Grafana credentials to the config.yml

Issues facing

• There is no direct plugin for opentelemetry in grafana.
• Getting below error when i run opentelemetry-instrument flask run

Error: failed to get config: cannot unmarshal the configuration: 1 error(s) decoding:

* error decoding 'exporters': unknown type: "grafana" for id: "grafana" (valid values: [logging jaeger kafka prometheusremotewrite zipkin otlp otlphttp file opencensus prometheus])
2023/03/17 06:46:07 collector server run finished with error: failed to get config: cannot unmarshal the configuration: 1 error(s) decoding:

* error decoding 'exporters': unknown type: "grafana" for id: "grafana" (valid values: [logging jaeger kafka prometheusremotewrite zipkin otlp otlphttp file opencensus prometheus])

[Depechie]

@sshiv5768 Grafana is only the visual layer. If you want to view the data from your app, you need to configure a data source inside Grafana.

For logs that would be Loki.
For traces that would be Tempo.
And metrics will fit within Prometheus.

For each element you can configure an exporter in your collector config and that way you can setup dashboards in Grafana for the data in each data source.

[pyohannes]

@sshiv5768 For experimentation purposes, you could give this a try: https://github.com/grafana/docker-otel-lgtm

It provides a docker image that includes Loki, Tempo, and Prometheus. You can send data via the standard OTLP protocol.

[Depechie]

Similar setup but with .NET instead of Java can be found here https://github.com/Depechie/OpenTelemetryGrafana ;)