Using OTEL community edition to leverage logging into AWS CLOUDWATCH

In the previous story we understood how to use opentelemetry and we integrated aws cloudwatch with otel collectors .

But we also talked about one drawback there if you remember ,aws otel collector right now don’t support pushing logs to cloudwatch , only metrics and traces are allowed . We also discussed that community edition can be used to leverage shipping logs to cloudwatch . So I have tried it out to test it out and yeah it worked out.

. Here is the community repo for opentelemetry

. In the repository u will be able to see configurations for exporters of different vendors here is the exporter that I am using for cloudwatch,similarly you will be seeing configurations setup for receivers , processors and extensions too.

So if u have read through the previous article , you already know how to install the otel on eks , so lets just see how to utilize otel-contrib edition for exporting cloudwatch logs .

All you need to do for exporting logs is just reconfigure the collector with community edition and also add right exporters and pipelines

otelcollector.yaml
---

$ kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: opentelemetry.io/v1alpha1
kind: OpenTelemetryCollector
metadata:
  name: sidecar-for-my-app
spec:
  image: public.ecr.aws/aws-observability/aws-otel-collector:latest
  mode: sidecar
  config: |
    extensions:
      health_check:
      pprof:
        endpoint: 0.0.0.0:zzzz

    receivers:
      otlp:
        protocols:
          grpc:
            endpoint: 0.0.0.0:xxxx #(grpc endpoint on which my pod/api sends logs, so our sidecar listens to this port and collects from here)
          http:
            endpoint: 0.0.0.0:yyyy #(http endpoint on which my pod/api sends logs, so our sidecar listens to this port and collects from here)

    processors:
      batch:

    exporters:
      logging:
        loglevel: debug
      awsxray:
        region: <region>
      awsemf:
        log_group_name: <log-group-name>
        log_stream_name: <log-stream-name>
        namespace: <namespace>
        region: <region>
      awscloudwatchlogs:
        log_group_name: <container_log_group_name>
        log_stream_name: <container_log_stream_name>
    service:
      pipelines:
        traces:
          receivers: [oltp]
          exporters: [awsxray]
        metrics:
          receivers: [otlp]
          exporters: [awsemf]
        logs:
          receivers: [otlp]
          processors: [batch]
          exporters: [awscloudwatchlogs]
      extensions: [pprof]
      telemetry:
        logs:
          level: debug
EOF

$ kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: myapp
  annotations:
    sidecar.opentelemetry.io/inject: "true"
spec:
  containers:
  - name: myapp
    image: someimage:latest
    ports:
      - containerPort: 8080
        protocol: TCP
EOF

So using this sidecar configuration and adding the sideacar to ur pod/deployment should be goood enough and you will be able to see logs going into loggroup you mentioned in aws cloudwatch