Using OpenTelemetry Collector to collect traces to send to App Insights

Dapr integrates with OpenTelemetry (OTEL) Collector using the OpenTelemetry protocol (OTLP). This guide walks through an example using Dapr to push traces to Azure Application Insights, using the OpenTelemetry Collector.

Prerequisites

• Install Dapr on Kubernetes
• Create an Application Insights resource and make note of your Application Insights connection string.

Set up OTEL Collector to push to your App Insights instance

To push traces to your Application Insights instance, install the OpenTelemetry Collector on your Kubernetes cluster.

1. Download and inspect the open-telemetry-collector-appinsights.yaml file.

2. Replace the <CONNECTION_STRING> placeholder with your App Insights connection string.

3. Deploy the OpenTelemetry Collector into the same namespace where your Dapr-enabled applications are running:

   kubectl apply -f open-telemetry-collector-appinsights.yaml
   

Set up Dapr to send traces to the OpenTelemetry Collector

Create a Dapr configuration file to enable tracing and send traces to the OpenTelemetry Collector via OTLP.

1. Download and inspect the collector-config-otel.yaml. Update the namespace and otel.endpointAddress values to align with the namespace where your Dapr-enabled applications and OpenTelemetry Collector are deployed.

2. Apply the configuration with:

   kubectl apply -f collector-config-otel.yaml
   

Deploy your app with tracing

Apply the tracing configuration by adding a dapr.io/config annotation to the Dapr applications that you want to include in distributed tracing, as shown in the following example:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  ...
spec:
  ...
  template:
    metadata:
      ...
      annotations:
        dapr.io/enabled: "true"
        dapr.io/app-id: "MyApp"
        dapr.io/app-port: "8080"
        dapr.io/config: "tracing"

You can register multiple tracing exporters at the same time, and the tracing logs are forwarded to all registered exporters.

That’s it! There’s no need to include any SDKs or instrument your application code. Dapr automatically handles the distributed tracing for you.

View traces

Deploy and run some applications. After a few minutes, you should see tracing logs appearing in your App Insights resource. You can also use the Application Map to examine the topology of your services, as shown below:

Related links

• Try out the observability quickstart
• Learn how to set tracing configuration options