Send traces to Splunk Observability Cloud using the gRPC endpoint

You can send traces to Splunk Observability Cloud in OTLP format using the gRPC endpoint.

The Splunk Distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector uses native OTel components such as the OTLP exporter and the OTLP/HTTP exporter to send traces in OTLP format to Splunk Observability Cloud.

However, you can also send traces directly to Splunk Observability Cloud in OTLP format using the gRPC endpoint. This is useful when you need to bypass the OpenTelemetry Collector due to network or application requirements and want to sent data in OTLP format.

Note: To send data using the REST API endpoints, see Send metrics, traces, and events using Splunk Observability Cloud REST APIs.

Send traces using the gRPC endpoint

The gRPC ingest endpoint for traces is ingest.<realm>.signalfx.com:443, where <realm> is your Splunk Observability Cloud realm. Requests must contain an access token in the X-SF-Token header.

To obtain an access token, see Retrieve and manage user API access tokens using Splunk Observability Cloud.

To find your Splunk realm, see Note about realms.

Configure the Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector

To send traces directly to the gRPC ingest endpoint, add the following lines to the exporters section of your Collector configuration file:

exporters:
  otlp:
     endpoint: ingest.${SPLUNK_REALM}.signalfx.com:443
     headers:
        "X-SF-Token": "${SPLUNK_ACCESS_TOKEN}"

Make sure that the traces pipeline contains the otlp exporter:

service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      # ...
      exporters: [otlp]

Send data in OTLP format over HTTP

If you want to send data in OTLP format using HTTP instead of gRPC, see the documentation for the /trace/otlp endpoint .