Quickstart: Monitor hosts with OpenTelemetry

• An Elasticsearch cluster for storing and searching your data, and Kibana for visualizing and managing your data. This quickstart is available for all Elastic deployment models. The quickest way to get started with this quickstart is using a trial project on Elastic serverless.

• This quickstart is only available for Linux and MacOS systems.

• A user with the Admin role or higher—required to onboard system logs and metrics. To learn more, refer to User roles and privileges.

• Root privileges on the host—required to run the OpenTelemetry collector because of these components:

  • hostmetrics receiver to read all system metrics (all processes, memory, etc.).
  • filelog to allow the collector to read any user or application log files.

• An Observability project. To learn more, refer to Create an Observability project.

• This quickstart is only available for Linux and MacOS systems.

• A user with the Admin role or higher—required to onboard system logs and metrics. To learn more, refer to Assign user roles and privileges.

• Root privileges on the host—required to run the OpenTelemetry collector because of these components:

  • hostmetrics receiver to read all system metrics (all processes, memory, etc.).
  • filelog to allow the collector to read any user or application log files.

1. In Kibana, go to the Observability UI and click Add Data.

2. Under What do you want to monitor? select Host, and then select OpenTelemetry: Logs & Metrics.

   

3. Select the appropriate platform.

4. Copy the command under step 1, open a terminal on your host, and run the command.

   This command downloads the Elastic Agent package, extracts it in a EDOT directory. For example, elastic-distro-8.16.0-linux-x86_64. It also adds a sample otel.yml configuration file to the directory and updates the storage directory, Elastic endpoint, and API key in the file.

   The default log path is /var/log/*.log. To update the path, modify the otel.yml in the EDOT directory.

   Find additional sample otel.yml configuration files in the EDOT directory in the otel_samples folder.

5. Copy the command under Step 2 and run it in your terminal to start the EDOT Collector.

1. Create a new Elastic Observability Serverless project, or open an existing one.

2. To open the quickstart, go to Add Data.

3. Select Collect and analyze logs, and then select OpenTelemetry.

4. Under What do you want to monitor? select Host, and then select Elastic Agent: Logs & Metrics.

   

5. Select the appropriate platform, and complete the following:
6. For MacOS and Linux, copy the command, open a terminal on your host, and run the command to download and configure the OpenTelemetry collector.
7. For Kubernetes, download the manifest.
8. Copy the command under Step 2:
9. For MacOS and Linux, run the command in your terminal to start the EDOT Collector.
10. For Kubernetes, run the command from the directory where you downloaded the manifest to install the EDOT Collector on every node of your cluster.

Logs are collected from setup onward, so you won’t see logs that occurred before starting the EDOT Collector. The default log path is /var/log/*. To update the path, modify otel.yml.