Spin OTel Plugin

This is a plugin that makes it easy to use OTel with Spin.

Background

Spin applications have the ability to export metrics and trace data. This plugin provides dashboards for viewing the data.

Requirements

This plugin relies on third-party software to work properly. Please be sure you have the following installed before continuing:

• Latest version of Docker

Installation

You can install the otel plugin either using a stable release or from the main branch.

Install the latest version of the otel plugin

The latest stable release of the otel plugin can be installed as shown here:

spin plugins update
spin plugin install otel

Install the canary version of the plugin

The canary release of the otel plugin represents the most recent commit on main (HEAD) and may not be stable, with some features still in progress.

spin plugins install --url https://github.com/fermyon/otel-plugin/releases/download/canary/otel.json

Install from a local build

Alternatively, use the spin pluginify plugin to install from a fresh build. This will use the pluginify manifest (spin-pluginify.toml) to package the plugin and proceed to install it:

spin plugins install pluginify
go build -o otel
spin pluginify --install

Observability Stacks

The otel plugin currently supports two different observability stacks:

• Default: Multi-container observability stack based on Prometheus, Loki, Grafana and Jaeger
• Aspire: Single-container observability stack using .NET Aspire Dashboard

Usage

Once the plugin is installed, you can try the below commands:

Set up the observability stack

You chose the desired observability stack as part of the setup command. You can change the observability stack at any point in time by cleaning it up and re-running the setup command using another stack.

Set up the default observability stack

spin otel setup

Set up the aspire observability stack

spin otel setup --aspire

Run a Spin app that exports telemetry data

spin otel up

Any flags that work with the spin up command, will work with the spin otel up command.

spin otel up -- --help

Open the dashboards in the default browser

Depending on the chosen observability stack, you can use the sub-commands of spin otel open to open corresponding dashboards using your default browser.

Dashboard for viewing metrics and logs:

spin otel open grafana

Dashboard for viewing trace data:

spin otel open jaeger

Dashboard for querying and viewing metrics:

spin otel open prometheus

.NET Aspire Dashboard (all-in-one).

spin otel open aspire

Terminate the dashboards

spin otel cleanup