OpenTelemetry is a vendor-neutral observability framework for collecting, processing, and exporting telemetry data.
The Elastic Distributions of OpenTelemetry (EDOT) are composed of OpenTelemetry (OTel) project components, OpenTelemetry Collector, and language SDKs, which provide users with the necessary capabilities and out-of-the-box configurations, enabling quick and effortless infrastructure and application monitoring.
You can use OpenTelemetry to send your telemetry data to Elastic Observability in the following ways:
- Collect and send logs and host metrics to Elastic Cloud using the EDOT Collector.
- Instrument your applications and send logs, traces, and metrics to Elastic Cloud using the Elastic Distributions of select OpenTelemetry language SDKs. Currently, Elastic provides distributions for the following language SDKs: Java, .NET, Node.js, and Python.
- Build and configure a custom collector or extend the OpenTelemetry Collector Contrib distribution to collect logs and metrics and send them to Elastic Observability.
This diagram provides a quick overview of how the different components work together. Refer to the components for a more in-depth look.
These pages detail the components and how to configure the EDOT Collector.
- Components: Get details on the components used to receive, process, and export telemetry data.
- Guided onboarding: Use the guided onboarding in Elasticsearch Service or a serverless Observability project to send data using the EDOT Collector.
- Manual configurations: Manually configure the EDOT Collector to send data to Elastic Observability.
- Limitations: Understand the current limitations of the EDOT Collector.
- Kubernetes guided onboarding: Use the guided onboarding to send Kubernetes logs, metrics, and application traces to Elasticsearch using the OpenTelemetry Operator to orchestrate the EDOT Collectors and EDOT SDK instances you will need.
- Instrumenting applications on Kubernetes: Collect application data using EDOT language SDKs.
Elastic offers several Distributions that extend OpenTelemetry language SDKs. The following languages are currently available:
Configure a custom collector or the OpenTelemetry Collector Contrib distribution: Build and configure a custom collector or extend the OpenTelemetry Collector Contrib distribution to collect logs and metrics and send them to Elastic Observability.