Configure the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector to collect metrics and events from your PostgreSQL server instance.

1. Deploy a supported OpenTelemetry collector if it's not already deployed.

   • To deploy the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector:

     1. See Get started with the Splunk Distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector.
     2. Upgrade the collector to a supported version.

   • To deploy the community (OSS) version of the OpenTelemetry Collector:

     1. See the GitHub repository opentelemetry-collector-contrib.
     2. Upgrade the collector to a supported version.
2. Configure the postgresql receiver to collect infrastructure metrics from your PostgreSQL server instance.

   • If you're using the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector, see PostgreSQL receiver.

   • If you're using the community (OSS) version of the OpenTelemetry Collector, see https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/tree/main/receiver/postgresqlreceiver.

3. Enable Database Monitoring by modifying your OpenTelemetry Collector configuration.
   1. In your collector's YAML file, add additional configuration to the postgresql receiver:

      The example below shows the minimum required configuration, but you can add other options. See the community (OSS) OpenTelemetry Collector postgresql README.

      Important:

      In the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector, the following postgresql options have default values that are sufficient for database monitoring needs:

      • collection_interval (Default: 10s)
      • query_sample_collection.max_rows_per_query (Default: 100)
      • top_query_collection.max_rows_per_query (Default: 1000)

      The Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector uses carefully selected default values to support database monitoring without affecting the performance of the database or the collector. If you increase these values you might adversely affect the performance of your database or collector, and this could result in ingest throttling.

      Example:

          postgresql:
            collection_interval: 10s
            databases:
              - postgres
            endpoint: your-service-endpoint:5432
            events:
              db.server.query_sample:
                enabled: true
              db.server.top_query:
                enabled: true
            username: postgres
            password: your-password
            
            tls:
              insecure: true

   2. Add an additional exporter, named dbmon, with the configuration shown in the codeblock below.
      Note: The dbmon exporter sends OpenTelemetry-formatted logs to your Splunk Observability Cloud event endpoint rather than to its metrics endpoint.

      # Exporters define where the telemetry data is sent to
        exporters:
          # Exports dbmon events as logs
          otlphttp/dbmon:
            headers:
              X-SF-Token: your-splunk-access-token
              X-splunk-instrumentation-library: dbmon
            logs_endpoint: https://ingest.your-splunk-realm.signalfx.com/v3/event
            sending_queue:
              batch:
                flush_timeout: 15s
                max_size: 10485760 # 10 MiB
                sizer: bytes      

   3. Add a new logs pipeline named dbmon, with the following components:
      Important: If you use the resourcedetection processor in the collector, make sure to add this processor into the logs/dbmon pipeline as shown in the example below.

      service:
        pipelines:
      	…
          logs/dbmon:
            receivers:
              - postgresql
            processors:
              - memory_limiter
              - batch
              - resourcedetection
            exporters:
              - otlphttp/dbmon 

   4. Restart your collector.
      The command to restart the collector varies depending on which collector you deployed, which platform you deployed it on, and what tool you used to deploy it. For the Splunk Distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector deployed on Kubernetes platforms with Helm, the restart command is:

      helm upgrade your-splunk-otel-collector splunk-otel-collector-chart/splunk-otel-collector -f your-override-values.yaml

      where splunk-otel-collector-chart is the name you gave to the Helm chart in the helm repo add command (in other words, your command was helm repo add splunk-otel-collector-chart https://signalfx.github.io/splunk-otel-collector-chart ).