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Tails

Debugging The oTel Collector

It may seem odd that, despite the increasingly widespread adoption of the OpenTelemetry framework, not much in the way of third-party tooling has emerged. There is DashO’s very handy oTelBin validation tool and the otel-cli utility but not much else besides.

We were very pleased, therefore to recently come across not one, but two very handy tools for debugging the oTel Collector. First up is Tails - an app that runs as a sidecar to your OpenTelemetry Collector. The app developers include Jacob Aronoff of Lightstep and Austin Parker of Honeycomb and it is a lightweight web server that listens on a socket and streams live messages from a Collector. The app supports logs, traces and metrics and also has some cool features such as Play/Pause mode and filtering. The oTel Collector is a great piece of engineering but it can also be a bit of a black box. This is a great tool for providing visibility into the Collector’s telemetry streams.

oTel Desktop Viewer

Whereas Tails runs as a sidecar, oTel Desktop Viewer is a CLI tool that generates visualisations of OpenTelemetry Traces on your local machine. This is a really handy utility for those times when you want to view traces but have not yet got around to setting up an oTel collector or a third-party backend. If you are a strictly command-line oTel ninja then fear not, GitHub user Y.Matsuda has created a version that runs in a terminal. It would be great to see more oTel tooling like these emerging.

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