Exporters

Send telemetry to the OpenTelemetry Collector to make sure it’s exported correctly. Using the Collector in production environments is a best practice. To visualize your telemetry, export it to a backend such as Jaeger, Zipkin, Prometheus, or a vendor-specific backend.

Available exporters

The registry contains a list of exporters for Ruby.

Among exporters, OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) exporters are designed with the OpenTelemetry data model in mind, emitting OTel data without any loss of information. Furthermore, many tools that operate on telemetry data support OTLP (such as Prometheus, Jaeger, and most vendors), providing you with a high degree of flexibility when you need it. To learn more about OTLP, see OTLP Specification.

This page covers the main OpenTelemetry Ruby exporters and how to set them up.

OTLP endpoint

To send trace data to a OTLP endpoint (like the collector or Jaeger) you’ll want to use an exporter package, such as opentelemetry-exporter-otlp:

• bundler
• gem

bundle add opentelemetry-exporter-otlp

gem install opentelemetry-exporter-otlp

Next, configure the exporter to point at an OTLP endpoint. For example you can update config/initializers/opentelemetry.rb from the Getting Started by adding require 'opentelemetry-exporter-otlp' to the code:

# config/initializers/opentelemetry.rb
require 'opentelemetry/sdk'
require 'opentelemetry/instrumentation/all'
require 'opentelemetry-exporter-otlp'
OpenTelemetry::SDK.configure do |c|
  c.service_name = 'dice-ruby'
  c.use_all() # enables all instrumentation!
end

If you now run your application it will use OTLP to export traces:

rails server -p 8080

By default traces are sent to an OTLP endpoint listening on localhost:4318. You can change the endpoint by setting the OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT accordingly:

env OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT="http://localhost:4318" rails server -p 8080

To try out the OTLP exporter quickly and see your traces visualized at the receiving end, you can run Jaeger in a docker container:

docker run -d --name jaeger \
  -e COLLECTOR_ZIPKIN_HOST_PORT=:9411 \
  -e COLLECTOR_OTLP_ENABLED=true \
  -p 6831:6831/udp \
  -p 6832:6832/udp \
  -p 5778:5778 \
  -p 16686:16686 \
  -p 4317:4317 \
  -p 4318:4318 \
  -p 14250:14250 \
  -p 14268:14268 \
  -p 14269:14269 \
  -p 9411:9411 \
  jaegertracing/all-in-one:latest

Zipkin

To set up Zipkin as quickly as possible, run it in a docker container:

docker run --rm -d -p 9411:9411 --name zipkin openzipkin/zipkin

Install the exporter package as a dependency for your application:

• bundle
• gem

bundle add opentelemetry-exporter-zipkin

gem install opentelemetry-exporter-zipkin

Update your OpenTelemetry configuration to use the exporter and to send data to your Zipkin backend:

# config/initializers/opentelemetry.rb
require 'opentelemetry/sdk'
require 'opentelemetry/instrumentation/all'

require 'opentelemetry-exporter-zipkin'
OpenTelemetry::SDK.configure do |c|
  c.service_name = 'dice-ruby'
  c.use_all() # enables all instrumentation!
end

If you now run your application, set the environment variable OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER to zipkin:

env OTEL_TRACES_EXPORTER=zipkin rails server

By default traces are sent to a Zipkin endpoint listening on port localhost:9411. You can change the endpoint by setting the OTEL_EXPORTER_ZIPKIN_ENDPOINT accordingly:

env OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT="http://localhost:9411" rails server