Hosts / VMs Environments
On host or virtual machine environments we recommend deploying local, per-host OpenTelemetry Collector instances (here referred to as OTel Collector in Agent Mode).
These collectors have two main purposes:
- The collection of local logs and infrastructure metrics. Refer to this sample config file for recommended collector receiver configurations for hostmetrics and logs.
- Enriching application telemetry (from OTel SDKs that run within the instrumented applications on corresponding hosts) with resource information.
Though we recommend using EDOT SDKs and EDOT Collector in Agent mode in the edge setup (for supportability and enterprise feature reasons), it’s not a technical requirement. Elastic’s Observability solution is technically compatible with edge setups that are fully based on upstream and vanilla OTel components as long as the ingestion path follows the recommendations outlined in below sub-sections for the different Elastic deployment options.
Recommended architectures per Elastic deployment scenarios:
Elastic Cloud Serverless
Elastic Cloud Serverless provides a managed OTLP endpoint for ingestion of OpenTelemetry data.
Users can send their OTel data from the edge setup in OTel-native format through OTLP without any additional requirements for self-managed pre-processing of data.
Elastic Cloud Hosted
As of Elastic Stack version 9.0.0 on Elastic Cloud Hosted (ECH), users need to run a self-hosted EDOT Collector in Gateway Mode to ingest their OTel data from the edge setup in OTel-native format into the Elastic-hosted Elasticsearch.
The EDOT Collector in Gateway mode enriches and pre-aggrigates the data for a seamless experience in the Elastic Observability solution before ingesting it directly into Elasticsearch.
- If required, users can build their custom, EDOT-like collector following these instructions.
- The EDOT Gateway Collector does not send data through Elastic’s Integration / APM Server on ECH to ingest data into Elasticsearch.
We are working on providing an Elastic-hosted OTel gateway solution for Elastic Cloud Hosted, that will eliminate the need for self-managing an EDOT Gateway Collector. Meanwhile, if self-managing an EDOT Gateway is not a valid option for you, refer to Elastic’s classic ingestion path for OTel data on ECH.
Self-managed
In a self-managed deployment scenario, users need to host an EDOT Collector in Gateway mode that pre-processes and ingests OTel data from the edge setup into the self-managed Elastic Stack.
Compared to Elastic’s classic ingestion paths for OTel data, with the EDOT Gateway Collector there is no need for an APM Server anymore.