#Forwarding Telemetry Data to Third-Party Systems

The OpenTelemetry Collector exports telemetry data by using the OTLP exporter over the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP), which supports both gRPC and HTTP transports. If you need to forward telemetry data to a third-party system that does not support OTLP or another protocol supported by Alauda Build of OpenTelemetry v2, you can deploy an unsupported custom OpenTelemetry Collector that receives telemetry data over OTLP and forwards it to the target system by using a custom exporter.

#Prerequisites

• You have developed your own unsupported custom exporter that can forward telemetry data to your third-party system.
• An active ACP CLI (kubectl) session by a cluster administrator with the cluster-admin role.

#Procedure

1. Create a ConfigMap for the custom Collector configuration:

   apiVersion: v1
   kind: ConfigMap
   metadata:
     name: custom-otel-collector-config
   data:
     otel-collector-config.yaml: |
       receivers:
         otlp:
           protocols:
             grpc:
       exporters:
         # Replace debug with the exporter required by your third-party system.
         debug: {}
       service:
         pipelines:
           traces:
             receivers: [otlp]
             exporters: [debug]
   1. Replace debug with the exporter required by your third-party system.

2. Deploy the custom Collector and mount the configuration from the ConfigMap:

   apiVersion: apps/v1
   kind: Deployment
   metadata:
     name: custom-otel-collector-deployment
   spec:
     replicas: 1
     selector:
       matchLabels:
         component: otel-collector
     template:
       metadata:
         labels:
           component: otel-collector
       spec:
         containers:
         - name: opentelemetry-collector
           image: ghcr.io/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-releases/opentelemetry-collector-contrib:latest
           command:
           - "/otelcol-contrib"
           - "--config=/conf/otel-collector-config.yaml"
           ports:
           - name: otlp
             containerPort: 4317
             protocol: TCP
           volumeMounts:
           - name: otel-collector-config-vol
             mountPath: /conf
             readOnly: true
         volumes:
         - name: otel-collector-config-vol
           configMap:
             name: custom-otel-collector-config
   1. Replace the image with the required OpenTelemetry Collector version that includes the exporter needed by your third-party system.

3. Expose the custom Collector with a Service:

   apiVersion: v1
   kind: Service
   metadata:
     name: custom-otel-collector-service
     labels:
       component: otel-collector
   spec:
     type: ClusterIP
     ports:
     - name: otlp-grpc
       port: 4317
       targetPort: 4317
     selector:
       component: otel-collector
   1. The service name is used when you configure the OTLP exporter in the Alauda Build of OpenTelemetry v2 Collector custom resource.

4. Apply the resources:

   kubectl apply -f custom-collector-configmap.yaml
   kubectl apply -f custom-collector-deployment.yaml
   kubectl apply -f custom-collector-service.yaml