OpenTelemetry Collector

A ready-made gateway configuration for the upstream otel/opentelemetry-collector-contrib:0.103.0 image (pinned in both the Docker Compose file and the Kubernetes manifests). Point your fleet's OTLP exporters at the collector; it batches, applies memory limits, and forwards everything to BugWatch. Use it when you want one egress point, local buffering, or to keep API keys off application hosts. The project dashboard's Setup guide tab serves this config pre-filled.

Quick start (Docker Compose)link

BUGWATCH_API_KEY="sk_live_KEYID:secret" docker compose up -d

Compose refuses to start without BUGWATCH_API_KEY (the key needs ingest:write). BUGWATCH_HTTP defaults to https://api.newinstance.cloud; ports 4317 (gRPC) and 4318 (HTTP) are published; the container restarts unless stopped.

Point your application at itlink

Standard OpenTelemetry env vars, any language:

OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://collector-host:4318
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL=http/protobuf

Go gotcha: otlptracehttp.WithEndpoint takes host:port only and appends /v1/traces itself; passing a full URL there breaks the exporter.

Pipelinelink

OTLP receivers (gRPC 4317, HTTP 4318) then memory_limiter (512 MiB hard cap plus a 128 MiB spike allowance: on breach it drops the batch and logs instead of being OOM killed) then a resource upsert (collector=bugwatch-otel-collector) then batch (512 / 5 s) then the otlphttp/bugwatch exporter (gzip) to /v1/logs, /v1/traces and /v1/metrics with x-api-key. Health check on 13133. A debug exporter (verbosity basic or detailed) is defined but wired to no pipeline; add it temporarily to inspect payloads. The collector's own log level lives at service.telemetry.logs.level.

A gRPC exporter block (otlp/bugwatch, target api.newinstance.cloud:4317) ships commented out: to use it, uncomment it, add it to each pipeline, and set its TLS block deliberately.

Kuberneteslink

Apply namespace, secret, configmap, then deployment: 2 replicas behind a ClusterIP, reachable in-cluster at bugwatch-otel-collector.bugwatch.svc.cluster.local:4317|4318; liveness and readiness probe 13133; requests 250m/256Mi, limits 1000m/768Mi; scale with kubectl scale.

Config changeslink

Validate before shipping: otelcol-contrib validate --config config.yaml (or the same command through docker). Env references must use the ${env:VAR} form. TLS: outbound HTTPS to BugWatch needs no config; a self-signed backend needs tls.ca_file mounted; in Kubernetes terminate inbound TLS at the ingress or mesh and keep the receivers plain. Tuning: raise limit_mib when you see memory_limiter: dropping data; raise send_batch_size toward 2048 to 4096 above roughly 10k spans/s.

Alternatives without the collectorlink

• Prometheus remote_write straight to https://api.newinstance.cloud/api/v1/prom/write with x-api-key; Grafana reads from https://api.newinstance.cloud/api/v1/prom.
• A Jaeger UI can point at https://api.newinstance.cloud/jaeger/api.
• Apps can also speak OTLP directly to the platform (see OpenTelemetry, Prometheus & Tracing).

Troubleshootinglink

• Reachability: curl -v http://localhost:4318/v1/logs -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{}'; a 400 response (not a connection error) proves the collector is up.
• Kubernetes CrashLoopBackOff is usually a double base64-encoded secret; decode it and check it reads keyId:secret.