Compatible span formats for Splunk APM

Learn about the variety of span formats in Splunk APM.

Splunk APM supports a variety of span formats, depending on which agent, collector, or endpoint receives and exports trace data. For more information about instrumenting applications for Splunk APM, see Instrument your applications and services to get spans into Splunk APM.

For more information on the ingest API endpoints, see Send APM traces .

Span formats compatible with the OpenTelemetry Collector

The Splunk Distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector can collect spans in the following formats:

  • Jaeger: gRPC and Thrift

  • Zipkin v1, v2 JSON

  • OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP)

Note: Splunk APM Protocol (SAPM) components are deprecated. Use the OTLP format instead.

The following examples show how to configure receivers in the collector configuration file. You can use multiple receivers according to your needs.

Jaeger Thrift
# To receive spans in Jaeger Thrift format

receivers:
   jaeger:
      protocols:
         grpc:
            endpoint: 0.0.0.0:14250
         thrift_binary:
            endpoint: 0.0.0.0:6832
         thrift_compact:
            endpoint: 0.0.0.0:6831
         thrift_http:
            endpoint: 0.0.0.0:14268
Zipkin
# To receive spans in Zipkin format

receivers:
   zipkin:
      endpoint: 0.0.0.0:9411
OTLP
# To receive spans in OTLP format

receivers:
   otlp:
      protocols:
         grpc:
            endpoint: 0.0.0.0:4317
         http:
            endpoint: 0.0.0.0:4318

See Get started: Understand and use the Collector for more information on Collector configuration.

Span formats compatible with the ingest endpoint

If you can’t use or need to bypass the Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector, you can send your span data directly to the ingest API endpoints of Splunk Observability Cloud.

The ingest endpoint for Splunk Observability Cloud at https://ingest.<realm>.signalfx.com/v2/trace can receive spans directly in the following formats:

  • OTLP at /v2/trace/otlp with Content-Type:application/x-protobuf

  • Jaeger Thrift with Content-Type:application/x-thrift

  • Zipkin v1, v2 with Content-Type:application/json

In addition, the following endpoints are available:

  • OTLP at /v2/trace/otlp with Content-Type:application/x-protobuf

  • Jaeger Thrift at /v2/trace/jaegerthrift with Content-Type:application/x-thrift

  • Zipkin v1, v2 at /v2/trace/signalfxv1 with Content-Type:application/json

For more information on the ingest API endpoints, see Send APM traces .

Note: You can also send trace data in OTLP format directly to Splunk Observability Cloud using the gRPC endpoint, either directly or from an OpenTelemetry Collector. See Send traces to Splunk Observability Cloud using the gRPC endpoint.