The New Relic Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector (NRDOT) is a collection of prebuilt distributions of the OpenTelemetry Collector supported by New Relic. NRDOT is designed to work seamlessly with New Relic products and services, and it is the recommended way to collect, process, and export open telemetry data for use with New Relic. Each distribution comes bundled with configs that are pre-configured to integrate with New Relic ingest.
Rather than providing an all encompassing single distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector, we have focused on providing distributions that are:
- Lightweight
- Limited in scope
- Tailored to specific New Relic experiences
- Pre-configured to report to New Relic's OTLP endpoint
- Supported
This approach gives users a streamlined and well-tested experience, enabling faster enhancements to our distributions. Each distribution is designed for a specific New Relic use case, helping users easily integrate OpenTelemetry with New Relic. We aim for minimal overlap between distributions, allowing them to work alongside other collectors if needed. Furthermore, advanced users can create custom distributions with additional components using OCB.
Dica
There are scenarios where you may want to deploy the collector in a less opinionated way, we recommend reading our documentation on collector processing to understand how to configure the collector for your specific use case.
Before diving into one of our distributions we recommend familiarizing yourself with the basic concepts of OpenTelemetry Collector to understand how our configurations are structured and how to customize them to your needs.
Deployments
The collector itself is a single binary that can be deployed in a variety of ways. The typical deployment strategies are:
- As an agent: Deployed on the same host as the application.
- As a gateway: Deployed as a central point for telemetry collection.
Each NRDOT distribution is configured out of the box with a specific deployment in mind, but can be customized to fit your needs by providing custom configs. Additional information on deployment patterns can be found in the OpenTelemetry Collector documentation.
Distributions
There are currently 2 pre-built distributions of the OpenTelemetry Collector available in NRDOT.
Distribution | Description | Deployment strategy |
|---|---|---|
Distribution focused on monitoring host metrics and logs. | Typically deployed as an agent. | |
Distribution focused on monitoring a Kubernetes cluster (still in preview) | Typically deployed as either an agent (DaemonSet) or gateway (Deployment). |
Installation
Documentation on installation can be found in the installation section of our repository nrdot-collector-release.
Troubleshooting
For troubleshooting steps, please refer to the troubleshooting section in our repository nrdot-collector-release.