Send OpenTelemetry traces and metrics data to VMware Aria Operations for Applications (formerly known as Tanzu Observability by Wavefront).

Sending Data to Our Service

If you use OpenTelemetry, you can configure the application to send traces or metrics to VMware Aria Operations for Applications (formerly known as Tanzu Observability by Wavefront) using the Wavefront proxy.

A data flow diagram that shows how the data flows from your application to the proxy, and then to our service

Configure the Wavefront Proxy

  1. Install the Wavefront proxy.
  2. Configure the Wavefront proxy to send OpenTelemetry data to our service. See the Wavefront proxy settings for OpenTelemetry.
    • Trace data: Port 4317 (recommended) with otlpGrpcListenerPorts or port 4318 (recommended) with otlpHttpListenerPorts.
    • Metrics data:
    • Port 4317 (recommended) with otlpGrpcListenerPorts or port 4318 (recommended) with otlpHttpListenerPorts.
    • To receive the OpenTelemetry resource attributes that your application sends for metrics data, set otlpResourceAttrsOnMetricsIncluded to true.
      Note: Be aware that setting this to true increases the chance of metrics exceeding the annotations count limit on your cluster, causing the metrics to be dropped by the Wavefront proxy.

Send and View Data

Follow these steps to send traces or metrics to our service:

  1. Configure your application to send trace data to the Wavefront proxy.
    By default, OpenTelemetry SDKs send data over gRPC to http://localhost:4317.
  2. Explore trace and metrics data:
    • Trace data:
      You can use our tracing dashboards to visualize the requests as traces, which consists of a hierarchy of spans. This visualization helps you pinpoint where the request is spending most of its time and discover problems.
    • Metrics data:
      Explore the metrics data you sent with charts and dashboards.

Metrics Conversion

The OpenTelemetry metrics your applications send are converted to our data format as follows:

A table that shows how the OpenTelemetry metrics are converted to the Wavefront metrics format

For more information on our metrics, see Metric Types.

Tutorials

Our OpenTelemetry GitHub repository includes specific examples for Java, Python, .NET, and more.

  • If you are on our Documentation, expand the tutorials section under OpenTelemetry, and try out a tutorial.
  • If you are on the GitHub repository, for example, go to the java-examples folder and follow the steps in the README to instrument Java Apps with OpenTelemetry.

Getting Support