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Version: 0.7.1

OTEL service

Quickwit natively supports the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) and provides a gRPC endpoint to receive spans from an OpenTelemetry collector, or from your application directly, via an exporter. This endpoint is enabled by default.

When enabled, Quickwit will start the gRPC service ready to receive spans from an OpenTelemetry collector. The spans are indexed in the otel-trace-v0_7 index by default, and this index will be automatically created if not present. The index doc mapping is described in the next section.

If for any reason, you want to disable this endpoint, you can:

  • Set the QW_ENABLE_OTLP_ENDPOINT environment variable to false when starting Quickwit.
  • Or configure the node config by setting the indexer setting enable_otlp_endpoint to false.
node-config.yaml
# ... Indexer configuration ...
indexer:
enable_otlp_endpoint: false

Sending spans in your own index

You can send spans in the index of your choice by setting the header qw-otel-traces-index of your gRPC request to the targeted index ID.

Trace and span data model

A trace is a collection of spans that represents a single request. A span represents a single operation within a trace. OpenTelemetry collectors send spans, Quickwit then indexes them in the otel-trace-v0_7 index by default that maps OpenTelemetry span model to an indexed document in Quickwit.

The span model is derived from the OpenTelemetry specification.

Below is the doc mapping of the otel-trace-v0_7 index:


version: 0.7

index_id: otel-trace-v0_7

doc_mapping:
mode: strict
field_mappings:
- name: trace_id
type: bytes
input_format: hex
output_format: hex
fast: true
- name: trace_state
type: text
indexed: false
- name: service_name
type: text
tokenizer: raw
fast: true
- name: resource_attributes
type: json
tokenizer: raw
- name: resource_dropped_attributes_count
type: u64
indexed: false
- name: scope_name
type: text
indexed: false
- name: scope_version
type: text
indexed: false
- name: scope_attributes
type: json
indexed: false
- name: scope_dropped_attributes_count
type: u64
indexed: false
- name: span_id
type: bytes
input_format: hex
output_format: hex
- name: span_kind
type: u64
- name: span_name
type: text
tokenizer: raw
fast: true
- name: span_fingerprint
type: text
tokenizer: raw
- name: span_start_timestamp_nanos
type: datetime
input_formats: [unix_timestamp]
output_format: unix_timestamp_nanos
indexed: false
fast: true
fast_precision: milliseconds
- name: span_end_timestamp_nanos
type: datetime
input_formats: [unix_timestamp]
output_format: unix_timestamp_nanos
indexed: false
fast: false
- name: span_duration_millis
type: u64
indexed: false
fast: true
- name: span_attributes
type: json
tokenizer: raw
fast: true
- name: span_dropped_attributes_count
type: u64
indexed: false
- name: span_dropped_events_count
type: u64
indexed: false
- name: span_dropped_links_count
type: u64
indexed: false
- name: span_status
type: json
indexed: true
- name: parent_span_id
type: bytes
input_format: hex
output_format: hex
indexed: false
- name: events
type: array<json>
tokenizer: raw
fast: true
- name: event_names
type: array<text>
tokenizer: default
record: position
stored: false
- name: links
type: array<json>
tokenizer: raw

timestamp_field: span_start_timestamp_nanos

indexing_settings:
commit_timeout_secs: 10

search_settings:
default_search_fields: []

Known limitations

There are a few limitations on the current distributed tracing setup in Quickwit 0.7:

  • The OTLP gRPC service does not provide High-Availability and High-Durability, This will be fixed in 0.8.
  • OTLP HTTP is only available with the Binary Protobuf Encoding. OTLP HTTP with JSON encoding is not planned yet, but this can be easily fixed in the next version. Please open an issue if you need this feature.

If you are interested in new features or discovered other limitations, please open an issue on GitHub.