OpenTelemetry Overview

The Netdata Agent receives OpenTelemetry telemetry over OTLP/gRPC, on port 4317: metrics become Netdata charts, and logs and traces are stored, indexed, on the receiving Agent. Anything that speaks OTLP/gRPC can send to it — an OpenTelemetry Collector, an instrumented application, an SDK — with TLS or mutual TLS on the endpoint. Start with OTLP Ingestion for the endpoint, the exporter block, and two smoke tests.

Metrics

Gauges, sums, histograms with explicit buckets, and summaries become charts under otel. contexts, with the resource, scope, and data-point attributes as labels; you attach health alerts to them as to any other chart. Exponential histograms are not ingested. Mapping files control the dimension attribute and collection interval per instrumentation scope, and a per-request budget (100 by default) bounds how many new charts one request may create. The receiver recipes are in Metrics Collection; every option is in the plugin reference.

Logs

Logs land in Netdata's log store on the receiving Agent: every field indexed, exact counts, size and age retention, and optional offloading to S3-compatible object storage with transparent read-back. You explore them in the Logs tab under the otel-logs source. Which sources to centralize at all is a Logs Management decision — see Centralizing Logs with OpenTelemetry; the Collector recipes per source are in Logs Collection, and retention and offloading are in Log Storage and Retention.

Traces

Traces land on the receiving Agent too: spans indexed, their own retention settings, and the same optional offloading to S3-compatible object storage as logs, read back through the download cache both signals share. You explore them in the Traces tab. Sending traces from an SDK or a Collector is in OTLP Ingestion; storage, retention, offloading, and sizing are in Trace Storage and Retention.

Requirements

• Linux native packages install the plugin as a dependency of netdata; static builds bundle it (except 32-bit ARMv6) and all Docker images include it. macOS kickstart installs provision a Rust toolchain and build it — when no adequate toolchain ends up available, the install continues with a warning and without the plugin. Linux source builds need --enable-plugin-otel. It is not available on Windows or FreeBSD.
• Viewing logs and traces requires signing in with Netdata Cloud, free for community use.
• The examples on these pages are validated with OpenTelemetry Collector Contrib 0.157.0.

In this section

• OTLP Ingestion — the endpoint, the exporter, smoke tests, troubleshooting.
• Securing the OTLP Endpoint — TLS, mutual TLS, network controls, certificate rotation.
• Metrics Collection — receiver recipes for hosts and applications.
• Logs Collection — receiver recipes for journals, files, Windows event channels, Kubernetes, macOS, and syslog.
• Transformations — parse, enrich, normalize, and drop records before export.
• Logs-to-Metrics — count matching log records and alert on the rate.
• Trace Storage and Retention — how spans are stored, retention, offloading, and sizing.
• Syslog from Network Devices — device syslog through a Collector receiver.
• OpenTelemetry Plugin Reference — every otel.yaml option.