Observe Agent

Today, we’re excited to announce the v1.0.0 release of the Observe Agent. The Observe Agent is a distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector that’s custom tailored to meet the needs of our customers and to work seamlessly with the Observe platform. The release of this agent based on the OpenTelemetry Collector is another step on our journey towards standardizing on OpenTelemetry as the framework and format for observability data collection. The industry at large is moving towards OpenTelemetry as the standard and we believe that’s the correct direction both for us and to provide the best experience for our customers. In addition to furthering our OpenTelemetry support, creating our own distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector also provides many other benefits for our customers.

 

Bundled configurations that Just Work

The upstream OpenTelemetry Collector is incredibly flexible and includes a plethora of components that can collect, transform, and export data. However, each component needs to be individually configured and pipelines need to be assembled carefully to produce data that best fits the user’s needs. Observe Agent bundles configurations that just work out-of-the-box, making installation a breeze. One install gets you one agent and one protocol for logs, metrics, and traces. While the distribution is shipped with preset configurations, it is easily customizable to fit unique requirements that our customers may have, giving them all the flexibility in collecting telemetry data.

 

Includes custom code and extensions to supercharge Observe’s functionality

Producing our own distribution also opens the door for us to produce and ship our own custom components. These custom components give us the freedom to inject logic that might not make sense to contribute back to the open source project; for example, custom transformations on data to calculate and add attributes that can then be utilized for correlating in the Observe platform. Not only can we create custom components, we can also extend the executable CLI with additional commands and functionality. These commands will help make operating and debugging the agent even easier than the open source agent.

 

Focus on providing the best experience possible with a single solution

Before the OTEL collector, the data ingestion space was mostly supported by a wide variety of open source agents. For each data type (logs, metrics, spans) users had the choice of multiple agents (Fluentd or Fluent Bit for logging, Prometheus or Telegraf for metrics, Zipkin or Jaeger for distributed tracing). Initially our approach was to try and meet customers wherever they were. In practice what that meant was that we had to try and develop an onboarding flow and configurations for each of these open source agents. Couple that with the fact that the configs and flows were different between operating systems and it quickly became clear that we were going to be stretched extremely thin. As a result, we’ve struggled to provide a best-in-class onboarding experience in a consistent way for all of the tooling that we “supported”. By moving to a single agent, we can focus on developing, testing, and supporting a single onboarding flow and a single technology. We’re confident that we can deliver a magical onboarding experience that just works no matter where you’re trying to collect data from. 

 

Increased validation and security oversight

Finally, by producing our own agent we can take control of the build and release processes. This allows us to more thoroughly test new releases from the open source project and ensure that they don’t introduce any regressions or interoperability issues with the Observe platform. It also means that we can more tightly control and audit the packages that are bundled with the Observe Agent. This allows us to implement a security policy that includes vulnerability checks and means that we can guarantee the security of each version of the Agent package that we release. 

 

Get started today

 

The new Observe Agent based on the open source OTEL Collector delivers a best-in-class experience in data collection. Users adopting the agent will be able to deploy with ease and can begin utilizing the powerful features in the Observe platform right away. If you’re already using an earlier version of the Observe Agent, see the Upgrade Guide for instructions on upgrading. If you aren’t using the Observe Agent yet but would like to, please reach out to your account team member or take a look at the public documentation.