OTel Telemetry Collection Plugin

Plugin for collecting per-service OpenTelemetry resource attributes from Elasticsearch and shipping them via Event-Based Telemetry (EBT). It sends 1 event per signal type (traces, metrics, logs) with no cross-signal merging in Kibana.

Overview

The OTel Telemetry Collection plugin is owned by the Observability BI team and provides:

Per-service metadata collection — Runs scheduled tasks to gather OTel resource attributes per service+environment pair
Per-signal events — Sends one EBT event per signal type (traces, metrics, logs)
Dynamic configuration — Query parameters and batching thresholds are configurable via CDN

Features

SDK/Distro Tracking: Collects SDK name, language, version, distro name/version
Infrastructure Context: Cloud provider/platform/region/AZ, host architecture
OS & Runtime Info: OS type/name/version, runtime name/version, executable name
Instrumentation Scopes: Library/scope names (e.g. io.opentelemetry.grpc-1.6)
Orchestration Detection: K8s and container presence (boolean flags)
Task Scheduling: Runs collection tasks once per day via Task Manager

Configuration

The plugin's configuration prefix is xpack.otelTelemetryCollection

Plugin Configuration Options

enabled: Whether the plugin is enabled (default: true)
cdn.url — URL for artifact downloads
cdn.publicKey — Public key for artifact verification
cdn.requestTimeout — Timeout for CDN requests

Configuration Example

kibana.yml

yaml

xpack.otelTelemetryCollection:
  enabled: false
  cdn:
    url: 'https://artifacts.security.elastic.co'
    publicKey: '...'
    requestTimeout: 10000

Dependencies

Required Plugins: taskManager
Optional Plugins: telemetry
Owner: @elastic/observability-bi

Development

This plugin is server-side only and depends on:

Task Manager for scheduled metadata collection
Analytics service for EBT event shipping
Elasticsearch client for OTel index queries

See the Kibana contributing guide for instructions setting up your development environment.