Send OpenTelemetry data to multiple backends

• How-to guide
• 2-min read
• Published Jan 26, 2024

The following configuration example shows how to configure a Collector instance to send telemetry data to multiple backends at the same time.

Prerequisites

See Collector Deployment and Collector Configuration on how to set up your Collector with the configuration below.

Demo configuration

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

exporters:
  otlp_http/dynatrace:
    endpoint: ${env:DT_ENDPOINT}
    headers:
      Authorization: "Api-Token ${env:DT_API_TOKEN}"
  otlp_grpc/coldstorage:
    endpoint: my.coldstorage.example:4317

service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers: [otlp]
      processors: []
      exporters: [otlp_http/dynatrace, otlp_grpc/coldstorage]
    metrics:
      receivers: [otlp]
      processors: []
      exporters: [otlp_http/dynatrace, otlp_grpc/coldstorage]
    logs:
      receivers: [otlp]
      processors: []
      exporters: [otlp_http/dynatrace, otlp_grpc/coldstorage]

Components

For our configuration, we configure the following components.

Receivers

Under receivers, we specify the otlp receiver as the active receiver component for our Collector instance.

Exporters

Under exporters, we specify the following exporter instances for our backends.

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

Service pipelines

Under service, we eventually assemble our receiver and exporter objects into pipelines, which accept any OTLP request (HTTP and gRPC) and forward it to the configured backends, using the configured exporters.

Limits and limitations

Data is ingested using the OpenTelemetry protocol (OTLP) via the Dynatrace OTLP APIs and is subject to the API's limits and restrictions. For more information see: