Configure the Technical Add-on for the Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector

Configure the Technical Add-on for the Splunk Distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector.

To configure the OpenTelemetry Collector within the Add-on, follow these steps:

  1. Create a new configuration file in YAML format for the Collector. See more at Get started: Understand and use the Collector.

  2. Edit the default version of your inputs.conf file to point to the new configuration file.

  3. Restart the Splunk Universal Forwarder.

Activate trace collection

The Splunk Add-on for the OpenTelemetry Collector does not perform automatic tracing. To configure your Collector instance to receive traces from your applications, see Instrument back-end applications to send spans to Splunk APM.

Manage multiple Collectors

If your configuration uses more than one Collector, consider the following best practices:

  • Deploy different agent_config.yaml files to different hosts. For example, a version of the add-on with MySQL Receiver enabled, and a different version of the add-on with MS SQL Server Receiver enabled will work best when deployed on different hosts.

  • Deploy the same files to every host, then point to another agent_config.yaml file in inputs.conf in the splunk_config_dir or splunk_config_yaml properties.

  • Deploy the same instance of the Splunk Add-on for the OpenTelemetry Collector to all hosts, then deploy another instance of the add-on that does not contain binaries and only contains a YAML file with a specific receiver enabled. In this case, the YAML file from the second add-on instance will supersede the YAML from the first add-on instance on a particular host.

  • Designate one instance of the Splunk Add-on for the OpenTelemetry Collector as your default Collector, tailor it to your needs, and then create variants of the add-on using a different name. Then deploy each variant to a different server class.