Application Insights Exporter for OpenTelemetry

The Application Insights Exporter allows to read traces exported from Azure Application Insights via Azure EventHub and converts/forwards to an OpenTelemetry OTLP compatible endpoint.

How does it work?

The project provides an Azure Function, bound to an EventHub from which it receives, converts and forwards the telemetry.

Supported Application Insights telemetry types are:

• AppDependency
• AppRequests

Supported OpenTelemetry formats are:

• OTLP/HTTP binary format

Getting Started

Pre-Requisites

• Create or configure an Azure EventHub with the name "appinsights" to which you want forward the telemetry from your Application Instance.
• If your target backend doesn't support OLTP/HTTP binary format, you can use an OpenTelemetry Collector as a receiving endpoint for the Application Insights Exporter.

Sending trace telemetry

Configure Diagnostic settings of your Application Insights instance from which you want to forward the telemtry.

• Check Dependencies and Requests in the telemetry catgories (all other categories will be ignored when processing)
• Check the Stream to an event hub and select your previously configured eventhub.

Running the forwarder locally

1. Configure local.settings.json

{
  "IsEncrypted": false,
  "Values": {
    "AzureWebJobsStorage": "UseDevelopmentStorage=true",
    "FUNCTIONS_WORKER_RUNTIME": "dotnet",
    "EHConnection": "<YourEventHubConnectionString",
    "OTLP_ENDPOINT": "http://localhost:4318/v1/traces"
    /*,"OTLP_HEADER_AUTHORIZATION": "<YOUR-AUTHORIZATION-HEADER-VALUE>"*/
  }
}

• Replace the value of EHConnection with the connection string to read from your configured eventhub. Read more about here, how to get an Event Hub connection string
• Configure the *OTLP_ENDPOINT to point to your targeted OLTP/HTTP binary compatible endpoint. By default it's an local endpoint configured for testing.
• Optionally configure OTLP_HEADER_AUTHORIZATION. If your OTLP endpoint requires authentication, you can set the Authorization http-header with this setting.

2. Run your Function

For more details how to run an Azure Function locally see Code and test Azure Functions locally

[Optional] Run an OpenTelemetry Collector

The project contains a collector config otel_collector_config.yaml, configured with a pipeline for an OTLP/HTTP format requiring an authorization token. It allows to pass the receiving OTLP endpiont and an authorization token via environment variables.

receivers:
  otlp:
    protocols:
      http:
exporters:
  otlphttp:
    endpoint: "${OTLPHTTP_ENDPOINT}"
    headers: {"Authorization": "Api-Token ${API_TOKEN}"}
service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers: [otlp]
      processors: []
      exporters: [otlphttp]

Now run the standard OpenTelemetry collector image from Docker-Hub otel/opentelemetry-collector-contrib, dynamically passing over necessary configuration.

Windows

docker run -p 4318:4318  -e OTLPHTTP_ENDPOINT="<Your-receiving-OTLP-endpoint>" -e API_TOKEN="<Your-api-token>" -v %cd%/otel_collector_config.yaml:/etc/otelcol-contrib/config.yaml otel/opentelemetry-collector-contrib

Linux

docker run -p 4318:4318  -e OTLPHTTP_ENDPOINT="<Your-receiving-OTLP-endpoint>" -e API_TOKEN="<Your-api-token>" -v $(pwd)/otel_collector_config.yaml:/etc/otelcol-contrib/config.yaml otel/opentelemetry-collector-contrib

Note: Replace <Your-receiving-OTLP-endpoint> and &lgt;Your-api-token> with the values matching your trace backend's configuration

Original Trace in Application Insights

Exported Trace in Dynatrace

Release Notes

v0.1.0 - Initial release supporting AppDependency, AppRequests mapped and forwarded to OTLP/HTTP JSON v0.9.0 - Swichting from OTLP/HTTP json format to OTLP/HTTP binary format.

Contribute

This is an open source project, and we gladly accept new contributions and contributors.

License

Licensed under Apache 2.0 license. See LICENSE for details.