Otel Collector

Sign in to the AWS Management Console, open the EC2 service and select Launch instance. Under Application and OS Images, choose AWS Marketplace AMIs and search for OpenTelemetry Collector. Select the SecureAnyCloud listing, choose Select, then choose Continue on the subscription summary.

Pick an instance type of t3.small or larger. Choose your EC2 key pair under Key pair (login). Under Network settings, select your VPC and subnet, then create or select a security group that opens port 22 from your management network. Leave the root volume at the default size or larger.

Select Launch instance. First-boot initialisation takes a few seconds after the instance state becomes Running and the status checks pass. By the time you can connect, otelcol-contrib.service is already running its sample pipeline.

Run the following command to launch an instance from the SecureAnyCloud OpenTelemetry Collector Marketplace AMI into an existing subnet and security group. Replace <ami-id> with the AMI ID shown on the Marketplace listing and <key-name> with your EC2 key pair name. Replace <subnet-id> with your subnet ID and <security-group-id> with a security group that opens port 22 from your management network.

aws ec2 run-instances \
  --image-id <ami-id> \
  --instance-type t3.small \
  --key-name <key-name> \
  --subnet-id <subnet-id> \
  --security-group-ids <security-group-id> \
  --tag-specifications 'ResourceType=instance,Tags=[{Key=Name,Value=otel-collector}]'

When the instance reaches the Running state and its status checks pass, note its public IP address or DNS name. You can find both in the EC2 console or with aws ec2 describe-instances.

Connect over SSH with your key pair and the login user for your operating system variant.

OS variant SSH login user

Ubuntu 24.04 ubuntu

ssh -i <key-name>.pem ubuntu@<public-ip>

A welcome banner prints the most useful commands. Run sudo cat /root/otel-collector-info.txt for the full getting-started notes. They cover what is running, the OTLP receiver ports, the health endpoint, where the pipeline configuration lives, and the common receiver, processor and exporter components.

The OpenTelemetry Collector runs as a system service that is enabled and started on boot. Confirm that the daemon is active:

systemctl is-active otelcol-contrib

The command prints active. For the full unit status, including the main PID, memory use and the daemon's command line, run:

systemctl status otelcol-contrib --no-pager

Next, confirm the installed binary and version. This image pins OpenTelemetry Collector 0.154.0:

otelcol-contrib --version

The output reports otelcol-contrib version 0.154.0. The otelcol-contrib binary is installed at /usr/bin/otelcol-contrib and resolves from any login shell.

The collector enables the health_check extension, bound to loopback only (127.0.0.1:13133). The endpoint answers on the instance and is never exposed to the network. Query it. While the collector is healthy, it returns Server available with HTTP 200:

curl -s http://127.0.0.1:13133

The sample pipeline configures the OpenTelemetry Protocol receivers on the standard ports, bound to loopback: gRPC on 127.0.0.1:4317 and HTTP on 127.0.0.1:4318. Confirm that the collector is listening on the OTLP and health ports:

ss -tlnp | grep -E '4317|4318|13133'

The output shows the collector process bound to 127.0.0.1:4317, 127.0.0.1:4318 and 127.0.0.1:13133. Point a locally running, instrumented application or an OpenTelemetry SDK at the OTLP endpoints to send it traces, metrics and logs.

The zPages extension is also enabled on 127.0.0.1:55679. It exposes a live view of the running pipeline at http://127.0.0.1:55679/debug/servicez.

The receivers stay bound to loopback by default. To accept telemetry from across your network, change the otlp receiver endpoint values in the [receivers] section of the configuration to a network interface (for example 0.0.0.0:4317). Then open the OTLP ports in the instance security group.

The OpenTelemetry Collector reads its pipeline from a single declarative configuration file at /etc/otelcol-contrib/config.yaml. The shipped configuration is a self-contained sample with no external dependencies. Print the receivers, processors, exporters and pipeline wiring:

sed -n '1,60p' /etc/otelcol-contrib/config.yaml

The sample pipeline pairs an otlp receiver (gRPC and HTTP) and a hostmetrics receiver (real host telemetry) with a batch processor, then fans out to a file exporter that writes JSON telemetry to the data volume and a debug exporter visible in the journal. The health_check and zpages extensions are listed under service.extensions.

To build your own pipeline, replace the sample receivers and exporters with your own.

• Receivers ingest from your sources: otlp for OpenTelemetry Protocol, prometheus for Prometheus scrape targets, hostmetrics for host telemetry, and journald, syslog and filelog for logs.
• Processors shape records: batch, memory_limiter, filter, transform and resource.
• Exporters ship the telemetry: otlp, otlphttp, prometheus, loki, kafka, file and debug.

After you edit the configuration, validate it and then restart the service to apply your changes:

sudo otelcol-contrib validate --config /etc/otelcol-contrib/config.yaml
sudo systemctl restart otelcol-contrib

Open whatever ingest ports your pipeline needs in the instance security group. The sample file exporter writes telemetry as JSON on the data volume:

sudo head -c 400 /var/lib/otelcol/telemetry.json

The file exporter writes its output to a dedicated EBS volume mounted at /var/lib/otelcol. This keeps exported telemetry off the operating system disk and lets you resize or snapshot the volume independently. Confirm the mount:

df -h /var/lib/otelcol

The data directory is owned by the collector's service user, so the daemon can write to it. To grow the volume, expand the EBS volume in the AWS console, then grow the filesystem on the instance with sudo resize2fs on the underlying device.

To keep other data off the OS disk, point your own file exporter, or any exporter that writes to disk (for example a persistent sending queue), at this volume.