Receive OpenTelemetry data with the Kafka receiver

• How-to guide
• 3-min read
• Published Nov 05, 2025

The following configuration example shows how you configure Kafka to read data from topics and relay this data via OTLP.

Prerequisites

Demo configuration

Here is an example YAML file for a basic Collector configuration that can be used to receive OpenTelemetry traces, metrics, and logs from Kafka.

receivers:
  kafka:
    tls:
      insecure: true # Only necessary if your Kafka server does not provide a certificate that's trusted by the OTel Collector.
    traces:
    metrics:
    logs:
    brokers: ["${env:BROKER_ADDRESS}"]

exporters:
  otlp_http:
    endpoint: ${env:DT_ENDPOINT}
    headers:
      Authorization: "Api-Token ${env:DT_API_TOKEN}"

service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers: [kafka]
      exporters: [otlp_http]
    metrics:
      receivers: [kafka]
      exporters: [otlp_http]
    logs:
      receivers: [kafka]
      exporters: [otlp_http]

Components

For our configuration, we configure certain components as described in the sections below.

Receivers

Under receivers, we specify kafka as the active receiver component for our deployment. This is required to receive data from Kafka server.

Exporters

Under exporters, we specify the otlp_http exporter to forward data into Dynatrace.

For this purpose, we set the following two environment variables and reference them in the configuration values for endpoint and Authorization.

Service pipeline

Under service, we assemble our receiver, and exporter objects into service pipelines, which will perform these steps: