Logging exporter

Use the logging exporter to write traces, metrics, and logs to the console. Read on to learn how to configure the component.

Note: The Logging exporter will be deprecated in September 2024 in favor of the Debug exporter. For more information, see the GitHub repo and docs at Debug exporter .

The logging exporter allows the OpenTelemetry Collector to send traces, metrics, and logs directly to the console. The supported pipeline types are traces, metrics, and logs. See Process your data with pipelines for more information.

Use the logging exporter to diagnose and troubleshoot issues with telemetry received and processed by the OpenTelemetry Collector, or to obtain samples for other purposes.

Get started

Note: The Logging exporter sends pipeline activity to the console as logs. To control the verbosity of the OpenTelemetry Collector itself, use the service.logger setting.

By default, the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector includes the logging exporter with verbosity set to detailed when deploying in host monitoring (agent) mode. See Collector deployment modes for more information.

exporters:
   # ...
   # Other exporters
   # ...
   logging:
      # loglevel is deprecated; use verbosity instead
      # Available levels are "basic", "normal", and "detailed"
      verbosity: detailed

To activate the logging exporter, add it to any pipeline you want to diagnose. For example:

:emphasize-lines: 9, 13, 20

service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers: [jaeger, otlp, zipkin]
      processors:
      - memory_limiter
      - batch
      - resourcedetection
      exporters: [otlphttp, signalfx, logging]
    metrics:
      receivers: [hostmetrics, otlp, signalfx]
      processors: [memory_limiter, batch, resourcedetection]
      exporters: [signalfx, logging]
    logs:
      receivers: [fluentforward, otlp]
      processors:
      - memory_limiter
      - batch
      - resourcedetection
      exporters: [splunk_hec, logging]

Available verbosity levels are basic, normal, and detailed. The correspondence between verbosity levels and log levels is the following:


Verbosity level	Log level (Deprecated)
`basic`	`warn`, `error`, `panic`, `fatal`
`normal`	`info`
`detailed`	`debug`

Note: The detailed verbosity level might increase resource consumption on the host. Deactivate the logging exporter after you’ve obtained sufficient samples.

Review collected logs

To review logs produced by the logging exporter, run the following command:

journalctl -u splunk-otel-collector.service -f

Sample configurations

The following example shows a logging exporter with detailed verbosity, which is equivalent to a debug log level. Initial sampling is five messages logged each second, logging every 200 messages after the initial sample.

exporters:
  logging:
    verbosity: detailed
    sampling_initial: 5
    sampling_thereafter: 200

Settings

The following table shows the configuration options for the logging exporter:

Troubleshooting

If you are a Splunk Observability Cloud customer and are not able to see your data in Splunk Observability Cloud, you can get help in the following ways.

Available to Splunk Observability Cloud customers

Submit a case in the Splunk Support Portal.
Contact Splunk Support.

Available to prospective customers and free trial users

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Documentation