Here's a quick summary of what we will be doing in this guide

• Create Serverless VPC Access Connector
• Enable Flow Logs
• Create Pub/Sub topic
• Create Log Router to route the Cloud Storage logs to SigNoz
• Create OTel Collector on Compute Engine instance to route logs from Pub/Sub topic to SigNoz Cloud
• Send and Visualize the logs in SigNoz Cloud

Prerequisites

• Google Cloud account with administrative privilege, or Serverless VPC Access Admin and Compute Engine Admin privilege. You might also require access to create Cloud Function in case you are following the tutorial to create Serverless VPC Connector.
• SigNoz Cloud Account (we are using SigNoz Cloud for this demonstration, we will also need ingestion details. To get your Ingestion Key and Ingestion URL, sign-in to your SigNoz Cloud Account and go to Settings >> Ingestion Settings)
• Access to a project in GCP

Setup

Create Serverless VPC Access Connector

Follow the Creating Serverless VPC Access Connector document to create the serverless VPC access connector.

Enable Flow Logs

Step 1: On the GCP Console, search for VPC, and select VPC networks.

Step 2: Enter the network where the traffic is being directed. In this case, the network on which the Compute Engine instance running the NodeJS is hosted.

Step 3: Select the Subnets tab from the top, and enter into the subnet corresponding to the region whose flow logs you want to capture. In this case, it will be the region in which the Compute Engine instance running the NodeJS is hosted.

Step 4: Select EDIT on the top, and click on the On radio button under the Flow logs.

Step 5: Click on SAVE. The flow logs are now enabled for the network in the corresponding region.

Create PubSub Topic

Follow the steps mentioned in the Creating Pub/Sub Topic document to create the Pub/Sub topic.

Create Log Router to Pub/Sub Topic

Follow the steps mentioned in the Log Router Setup document to create the Log Router.

To ensure you filter out only the Compute Engine logs, use the following filter conditions:

resource.type="gce_subnetwork"

Setup OTel Collector

Follow the steps mentioned in the Creating Compute Engine document to create another Compute Engine instance. We will be installing OTel Collector on this instance.

Install OTel Collector as agent

Firstly, we will establish the authentication using the following commands:

1. Initialize gcloud:

gcloud init

2. Authenticate into GCP:

gcloud auth application-default login

Let us now proceed to the OTel Collector installation:

Step 1: Download otel-collector tar.gz for your architecture

wget https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-releases/releases/download/v0.88.0/otelcol-contrib_0.88.0_linux_amd64.tar.gz

Step 2: Extract otel-collector tar.gz to the otelcol-contrib folder

mkdir otelcol-contrib && tar xvzf otelcol-contrib_0.88.0_linux_amd64.tar.gz -C otelcol-contrib

Step 3: Create config.yaml in the folder otelcol-contrib with the below content in it. Replace <region> with the appropriate SigNoz Cloud region. Replace SIGNOZ_INGESTION_KEY with what is provided by SigNoz:

receivers:
  otlp:
    protocols:
      grpc:
        endpoint: 0.0.0.0:4317
      http:
        endpoint: 0.0.0.0:4318
  googlecloudpubsub:
    project: <gcp-project-id>
    subscription: projects/<gcp-project-id>/subscriptions/<pubsub-topic's-subscription>
    encoding: raw_text
processors:
  batch: {}
exporters:
  otlp:
    endpoint: "ingest.<region>.signoz.cloud:443"
    tls:
      insecure: false
    headers:
      "signoz-ingestion-key": "<SigNoz-Key>"
service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers: [otlp]
      processors: [batch]
      exporters: [otlp]
    metrics:
      receivers: [otlp]
      processors: [batch]
      exporters: [otlp]
    logs:
      receivers: [otlp, googlecloudpubsub]
      processors: [batch]
      exporters: [otlp]

Step 4: Once we are done with the above configurations, we can now run the collector service with the following command:

From the otelcol-contrib, run the following command:

./otelcol-contrib --config ./config.yaml

Run in background

If you want to run OTel Collector process in the background:

./otelcol-contrib --config ./config.yaml &> otelcol-output.log & echo "$!" > otel-pid

The above command sends the output of the otel-collector to otelcol-output.log file and prints the process id of the background running OTel Collector process to the otel-pid file.

If you want to see the output of the logs you’ve just set up for the background process, you may look it up with:

tail -f -n 50 otelcol-output.log

Visualize the Logs obtained by OpenTelemetry in SigNoz Cloud

You can now visualize the logs corresponding to the traffic being sent on this VPC network.