This is part of an ongoing attempt at implementing the OpenTelemetry standard in Perl. The distribution in this repository implements an OpenTelemetry exporter that uses the OpenTelemetry Protocol to send the telemetry data to a collector. For ways to generate that telemetry data, you should look into the OpenTelemetry API distribution (if you are a library author) or the OpenTelemetry::SDK distribution (if you are an application author).
OpenTelemetry is an open source observability framework, providing a general-purpose API, SDK, and related tools required for the instrumentation of cloud-native software, frameworks, and libraries.
OpenTelemetry provides a single set of APIs, libraries, agents, and collector services to capture distributed traces and metrics from your application. You can analyze them using Prometheus, Jaeger, and other observability tools.
The telemetry data provided by the API and SDK distributions needs to be sent and collected somewhere for processing. This distribution provides an OTLP exporter class that can be used to send telemetry data to a collector that supports that protocol.
This distribution will be used by the OpenTelemetry::SDK distribution to send telemetry data (if configured to do so). If you are not writing an application that will send telemetry data to a collector, then you are unlikely to need distribution directly.
This repository has some optional external dependencies. In particular, it
requires the API distribution to work. But more importantly, in order to
export telemetry data using the http/protobuf protocol, it requires
cmake, a C++ compiler, and the development headers for the protobuf
and protoc libraries. Note that even if these are not available, this
exporter will continue to work, but it will only be able to export data
using the http/json protocol.
Check the documentation of your system for how to install these system dependencies. Here are some examples for some common Linux distributions:
# Debian / Ubuntu
apt install g++ cmake libprotobuf-dev libprotoc-dev
# Arch
pacman -S gcc protobuf
You can then install this distribution from CPAN:
cpanm OpenTelemetry::Exporter::OTLP
or directly from the repository if you want to install a development version (although note that only the CPAN version is recommended for production environments):
# On a local fork
cd path/to/this/repo
cpanm install .
# Over the net
cpanm https://github.com/jjatria/perl-opentelemetry-exporter-otlp.git
Then, if the SDK is configured to use this exporter, the telemetry data it generates should be exported to the specified endpoint automatically. OTLP is the default exporter for OpenTelemetry::SDK, so unless you've specifically configured it otherwise, you will start using it automatically.
Please refer to the documentation of that distribution for details on how to load it and configure it.
We are in the process of setting up an OpenTelemetry-Perl special interest group (SIG). Until that is set up, you are free to express your interest or join us in IRC on the #io-async channel in irc.perl.org.
The OpenTelemetry::Exporter::OTLP distribution is licensed under the same terms as Perl itself. See LICENSE for more information.