Export Traces to OpenTelemetry Compliant Receiver

Available on: Self-hosted Enterprise

Beta

Introduction

Distributed traces track and map journeys of user requests across various services or components which can then be analyzed via observability tools.

Traces are typically used to diagnose or debug which part of your application could potentially be responsible for a failure or error state and to monitor the performance of end-user interactions with your application.

Traces are generated by instrumenting application code. Hasura has instrumented all API queries, mutations and subscriptions with the OpenTelemetry format. These traces can be exported directly from your Hasura instances to your observability tool that supports OpenTelemetry traces. This can be configured in the Settings section of the Hasura Console.

Support for metrics and logs

Currently, the OpenTelemetry Integration exports only traces. The support for metrics and logs will be added in the future.

Configure the OpenTelemetry receiver

Supported from

OpenTelemetry traces are supported for Hasura GraphQL Engine versions v2.18.0 and above.

Console

Go to the Settings tab (⚙) in the console and click on OpenTelemetry Exporter. After adding appropriate values to the parameters, click Update and then toggle the Status button to enable the integration.

CLI

Create and update parameters in the file opentelemetry.yaml inside the metadata directory as follows:

status: enabled
data_types:
  - traces
exporter_otlp:
  headers:
    - name: x-test-header
      value: testing
    - name: x-header-from-env
      value_from_env: TEST_ENV_VAR
  resource_attributes:
    - name: stage
      value: production
    - name: region
      value: us-east
  otlp_traces_endpoint: http://host.docker.internal:4318/v1/traces
  protocol: http/protobuf
batch_span_processor:
  max_export_batch_size: 512

Apply the Metadata by running:

hasura metadata apply

API

See API reference documentation.

Parameters

The following parameters are needed to set up the integration with your observability tool:

Endpoint

The OpenTelemetry compliant receiver endpoint. The URL scheme (http or https) determines if SSL(TLS) should be used for the communication. Please check the documentation for your observability tool to determine how to set up an OpenTelemetry endpoint. There may be different endpoints provided for the HTTP and gRPC protocols (gRPC is not supported yet), so ensure that you use the appropriate endpoint for your chosen connection type.

Endpoint Notes

• You may have to append /v1/traces to the end of the receiver endpoint URL if the provided URL does not contain this already. This depends on the observability vendor.
• If you are running Hasura as a Docker container without host networking enabled, and want to connect to a local OpenTelemetry Collector, you may want to use this as the endpoint: http://host.docker.internal:4318/v1/traces.
• If the https endpoint uses a custom or self-signed CA, add the endpoint to the Insecure TLS Allow List.

OpenTelemetry Port Convention

It is a generally accepted convention that the OpenTelemetry receiver endpoint is exposed on port 4318 for HTTP but can usually be customized. Please check the documentation for your observability tool to determine the port number.

Connection Type

The protocol and transport to be used for the communication with the receiver. Hasura currently only supports the OpenTelemetry Protocol over HTTP (OTLP/HTTP with binary-encoded Protobuf payloads).

Data Type

Selects the type of observability data points to be exported. Traces are the only data types that are currently supported.

Batch Size

Batch size is the maximum number of data points (spans in the context of traces) allowed per export request made to the observability tool. Default size is 512.

Headers

Headers are (optionally) added to every request made by Hasura to the observability tool. They are generally Authorization/API keys with the required role/permissions to accept OpenTelemetry data. Please refer to the documentation in your observability tool to understand how required request headers need to be formatted. You can use an environment variable as a header value too. This is important for values which are sensitive.

Apply environment variables first

If you use an environment variable as a header value, please make sure that it's applied to the Hasura Docker container before starting the container.

Example using Console:

Attributes

Resource attributes are (optional) custom tags that are sent alongside observability data in order to identify the entity for which the observability data was recorded. This is usually used to identify sources in a distributed tracing environment and aids in granular filtering and analytics.

Example using Console:

Understanding traces

Use your observability tool's UI to visualize and perform further analytics on trace data to monitor, diagnose and troubleshoot your application. Traces and their spans are listed out and selecting a trace shows a flame graph containing a visual representation of where the operation spent its execution time.

For example, the image below shows a flame graph in Jaeger where a query took 5.64 milliseconds in total, of which 2.78 milliseconds was the actual Postgres database processing the query.

OpenTelemetry Collector

OpenTelemetry provides a Collector that can export OpenTelemetry data to observability tools that do not support native OpenTelemetry ingestion.

To work with such observability tools, Hasura's OpenTelemetry integration can be configured to send OpenTelemetry data to the collector.

Note

This collector should be run in your infrastructure and should be reachable by the Hasura backend that is configured to send the data to it. The list of supported exporter targets can be found in the OpenTelemetry Collector repository.