OpenTelemetry Receivers

Overview

OpenTelemetry receivers allow you to collect metrics from your infrastructure and third-party services (like Redis, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, Nginx, etc.) without installing separate agents for each service.

Think of a Receiver as a plugin for the OpenTelemetry Collector. It connects to a specific service, gathers its metrics, and exports them to SigNoz or any other backend of your choice.

Why use OpenTelemetry Receivers?

• Unified Collection: Instead of running a "Redis Exporter," a "Postgres Exporter," and a "Host Agent," you run a single OpenTelemetry Collector that handles everything.
• Rich Ecosystem: There are hundreds of community-maintained receivers available for databases, message queues, cloud providers, and more.
• Open Standard: You are using industry-standard configuration rather than proprietary vendor-specific agents.

Prerequisites

• OpenTelemetry Collector: You need the OpenTelemetry Collector running in your environment. See Installation Guides.
• Access to Configuration: You must be able to edit the otel-collector-config.yaml file where the collector is running.

Steps

To start collecting metrics from a new source, you need to do two things:

1. Define the receiver (tell the collector how to connect to your service).
2. Enable the receiver (tell the collector to process data from this source).

Step 1: Configure the Receiver

Open your otel-collector-config.yaml file. In the receivers section, add the configuration for the service you want to monitor.

For example, to monitor RabbitMQ, you would add:

receivers:
  # ... existing receivers ...
  rabbitmq:
    endpoint: http://localhost:15672
    username: <RABBITMQ_USERNAME>
    password: <RABBITMQ_PASSWORD>
    collection_interval: 30s

Note: You can find the configuration settings for any service in the OpenTelemetry Collector Contrib repository.

Step 2: Enable the Receiver in the Pipeline

Just defining the receiver isn't enough; you must add it to the pipeline so the data is actually processed and sent to SigNoz.

Scroll down to the service > pipelines > metrics section in your config file. Add your new receiver name (e.g., rabbitmq) to the receivers list.

service:
  pipelines:
    metrics:
      # Add 'rabbitmq' to the list of receivers
      receivers: [otlp, rabbitmq]
      processors: [batch]
      exporters: [otlp]

Step 3: Restart the Collector

For the changes to take effect, you must restart the OpenTelemetry Collector.

Validate

Once restarted, the metrics should start flowing into SigNoz.

1. Go to the Metrics Explorer in SigNoz.
2. In the query builder, search for metrics related to your service (e.g., type rabbitmq to see available RabbitMQ metrics).
3. Select a metric and run the query to verify data is present.

Next Steps

• Create Dashboards: Visualize your metrics by creating custom dashboards. Learn more.
• Set Alerts: Configure alerts to get notified when metrics cross a threshold. Learn more.

Get Help

If you need help with the steps in this topic, please reach out to us on SigNoz Community Slack.

If you are a SigNoz Cloud user, please use in product chat support located at the bottom right corner of your SigNoz instance or contact us at cloud-support@signoz.io.