Quickstart: Monitor hosts with OpenTelemetry
editQuickstart: Monitor hosts with OpenTelemetry
editThis functionality is in technical preview and may be changed or removed in a future release. Elastic will work to fix any issues, but features in technical preview are not subject to the support SLA of official GA features.
In this quickstart guide, you’ll learn how to monitor your hosts using the Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry (EDOT) Collector. You’ll also learn how to use Observability features to gain deeper insight into your observability data after collecting it.
Prerequisites
edit- 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.
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Root privileges on the host—required to run the OpenTelemetry collector because of these components:
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hostmetricsreceiver to read all system metrics (all processes, memory, etc.). -
filelogto allow the collector to read any user or application log files.
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Limitations
editRefer to Elastic OpenTelemetry Collector limitations for known limitations when using the EDOT Collector.
Collect your data
editFollow these steps to collect logs and metrics using the EDOT Collector:
- In Kibana, go to the Observability UI and click Add Data.
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Under What do you want to monitor? select Host, and then select OpenTelemetry: Logs & Metrics.
- Select the appropriate platform.
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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 sampleotel.ymlconfiguration 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 theotel.ymlin the EDOT directory.Find additional sample
otel.ymlconfiguration files in the EDOT directory in theotel_samplesfolder. - Copy the command under Step 2 and run it in your terminal to start the EDOT Collector.
Logs are collected from setup onward, so you won’t see logs that occurred before starting the EDOT Collector.
Under Visualize your data, you’ll see links to Logs Explorer to view your logs and Hosts to view your host metrics.
Gain deeper insight into your host data
editAfter using the Hosts page and Discover to confirm you’ve ingested all the host logs and metrics you want to monitor, use Elastic Observability to gain deeper insight into your host data with the following capabilities and features:
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In the Infrastructure UI, analyze and compare data collected from your hosts. You can also:
- Detect anomalies for memory usage and network traffic on hosts.
- Create alerts that notify you when an anomaly is detected or a metric exceeds a given value.
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In the Logs Explorer, search and filter your log data, get information about the structure of log fields, and display your findings in a visualization. You can also:
- Monitor log data set quality to find degraded documents.
- Run a pattern analysis to find patterns in unstructured log messages.
- Create alerts that notify you when an Observability data type reaches or exceeds a given value.
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Use machine learning to apply predictive analytics to your data:
- Detect anomalies by comparing real-time and historical data from different sources to look for unusual, problematic patterns.
- Analyze log spikes and drops.
- Detect change points in your time series data.
Refer to the What is Elastic Observability? for a description of other useful features.