OpenTelemetry Logging Format

SkyWalking can receive logs exported from OpenTelemetry collector, the data flow is:

graph LR
    B[OpenTelemetry SDK 1]
    C[FluentBit/FluentD, etc.]
    K[Other sources that OpenTelemetry supports ...]
    D[OpenTelemetry Collector]
    E[SkyWalking OAP Server]
    B --> D
    C --> D
    K --> D
    D -- exporter --> E

Recommend to use OpenTelemetry OTLP Exporter to forward collected logs to OAP server in OTLP format, and SkyWalking OAP is responsible for transforming the data format into native log format with analysis support powered by LAL script.

Deprecated: unmaintained and not recommended to use, will be removed.

OpenTelemetry SkyWalking Exporter was first added into open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib before OAP OTLP support. It transforms the logs to SkyWalking format before sending them to SkyWalking OAP. Currently, from OTLP community, it is not well maintained, and already being marked as unmaintained, and may be removed in 2024.

OpenTelemetry OTLP Exporter

By using this exporter, you can send any log data to SkyWalking OAP as long as the data is in OTLP format, no matter where the data is generated.

To enable this exporter, make sure the receiver-otel is enabled and the otlp-logs value is in the receiver-otel/default/enabledHandlers configuration section:

receiver-otel:
  selector: ${SW_OTEL_RECEIVER:default}
  default:
    enabledHandlers: ${SW_OTEL_RECEIVER_ENABLED_HANDLERS:"otlp-metrics,otlp-logs"}

Also, because most of the language SDKs of OpenTelemetry do not support logging feature (yet) or the logging feature is experimental, it’s your responsibility to make sure the reported log data contains the following attributes, otherwise SkyWalking is not able to consume them:

service.name: the name of the service that generates the log data.

And several attributes are optional as add-on information for the logs before analyzing.

service.layer: the layer of the service that generates the logs. The default value is GENERAL layer, which is 100% sampled defined by LAL general rule
service.instance: the instance name that generates the logs. The default value is empty.

Note, that these attributes should be set manually through OpenTelemetry SDK or through attribute#insert in OpenTelemetry Collector.

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