Troubleshooting

This page describes some options when troubleshooting the health or performance of the OpenTelemetry Collector. The Collector provides a variety of metrics, logs, and extensions for debugging issues.

Sending test data

For certain types of issues, particularly verifing configuration and debugging network issues, it can be helpful to send a small amount of data to a collector configured to output to local logs. For details, see Local exporters.

Checklist for debugging complex pipelines

It can be difficult to isolate problems when telemetry flows through multiple collectors and networks. For each “hop” of telemetry data through a collector or other component in your telemetry pipeline, it’s important to verify the following:

• Are there error messages in the logs of the collector?
• How is the telemetry being ingested into this component?
• How is the telemetry being modified (i.e. sampling, redacting) by this component?
• How is the telemetry being exported from this component?
• What format is the telemetry in?
• How is the next hop configured?
• Are there any network policies that prevent data from getting in or out?

More

For detailed recommendations, including common problems, see Troubleshooting from the Collector repo.