OpenTelemetry Advanced Settings

OTLP gRPC

Warning: Only update this section if you customized the Hardware Sentry Agent extension settings. The Hardware Sentry Agent pushes the collected data to the OTLP Receiver via gRPC on port TCP/4317.

The OTLP Receiver is configured by default with the self-signed certificate security/otel.crt and the private key security/otel.key to enable the TLS protocol. If you wish to set your own certificate file, configure the Hardware Sentry Agent with the correct Trusted Certificates File. Because the OTLP Exporter of the Hardware Sentry Agent performs hostname verification, you will also have to add the localhost entry (DNS:localhost,IP:127.0.0.1) to the Subject Alternative Name (SAN) extension of the new generated certificate.

Clients requests are authenticated with the Basic Authenticator extension.

  otlp:
    protocols:
      grpc:
        endpoint: localhost:4317
        tls:
          cert_file: security/otel.crt
          key_file: security/otel.key
        auth:
          authenticator: basicauth

OpenTelemetry Collector Internal Exporter for Prometheus

The OpenTelemetry Collector's internal Exporter for Prometheus is an optional source of data. It provides information about the collector activity (see Health Check). It's referred to as prometheus/internal in the pipeline and leverages the standard prometheus receiver.

  prometheus/internal:
    config:
      scrape_configs:
        - job_name: otel-collector-internal
          scrape_interval: 60s
          static_configs:
            - targets: [ localhost:8888 ]

Under the service:telemetry:metrics section, you can set the metrics level or the address of the OpenTelemetry Collector Internal Exporter (by default: localhost:8888).

service:
  telemetry:
    metrics:
      address: localhost:8888
      level: basic

HealthCheck

The healthcheck extension checks the status of Hardware Sentry OpenTelemetry Collector . It is activated by default and runs on port 13133 (http://localhost:13133).

Refer to Check the collector is up and running for more details.

zpages

The zpages extension provides debug information about all the different components. It notably provides:

• general information about Hardware Sentry OpenTelemetry Collector
• details about the active pipeline
• activity details of each receiver and exporter configured in the pipeline.

Refer to Check the pipelines status for more details.

Hardware Sentry Agent (hws_agent)

The Hardware Sentry Agent is the internal component which scrapes hosts, collects metrics and pushes OTLP data to the OTLP receiver of the OpenTelemetry Collector. The hws_agent extension starts the Hardware Sentry Agent as a child process of the OpenTelemetry Collector, checks that this child process is up and running and restarts it if needed.

Configure the hws_agent extension as follows:

  hws_agent:
    grpc: <http|https>://<host>:<port>   # Default: https://localhost:4317
    extra_args: [ <string> ... ]         # Example: [ --config=config/alternate-configuration-file.yaml ]
    restart_delay: <duration>            # Default: 10s
    retries: <int>                       # Default: -1 (Means no limit)

where:

• grpc is the endpoint to which the Hardware Sentry Agent will push OpenTelemetry data. By default, the Hardware Sentry Agent pushes metrics to the local OTLP receiver using gRPC on port TCP/4317 (By default: https://localhost:4317).
• extra_args specifies a list of additional arguments to be used by the Hardware Sentry Agent. By default, the Hardware Sentry Agent's configuration file is ./config/hws-config.yaml but you can provide an alternate configuration file by adding a new extra argument. Example: --config=C:\Program Files\hws-otel-collector\config\hws-config-2.yaml.
• restart_delay specifies the period of time after which the Hardware Sentry Agent is restarted when a problem has been detected. If not set, the Hardware Sentry Agent will be restarted after 10 seconds.
• retries specifies the number of restarts to be triggered until the Hardware Sentry Agent is up and running again. If not set, the extension will try restarting the Hardware Sentry Agent until it is up and running.

Refer to Configure the Hardware Sentry Agent for more details.

Basic Authenticator

The Basic Authenticator extension authenticates the OTLP Exporter requests by comparing the Authorization header sent by the OTLP Exporter and the credentials provided in the security/.htpasswd file. Refer to the Apache htpasswd documentation to know how to manage user files for basic authentication.

  basicauth:
    htpasswd:
      file: security/.htpasswd

The .htpasswd file is stored in the security directory.

Warning: If a different password is specified in the .htpasswd file, update the Basic Authentication Header of the Hardware Sentry Agent.