GoKawiilWe integrated the OpenTelemetry Ruby logs SDK in a Rails app to export logs directly to a vendor, without running a Collector.
Recently, we needed to add observability to a Rails project without getting locked into a single vendor. OpenTelemetry was the natural choice.
It generates three kinds of telemetry data, called signals: logs, metrics, and traces. Each signal is independent, so you can adopt one without the others.
All of these signals travel in a standard, vendor-agnostic format known as OTLP (OpenTelemetry Protocol). Because this format is standard across the industry, we can switch backends (like Datadog, New Relic, or Grafana Cloud) in the future without rewriting any application code.
In this post, we will explain how we configured the OpenTelemetry Ruby SDK to export logs directly to our vendor, Grafana Cloud. We will also discuss a few issues we encountered along the way and the upstream fixes we contributed.
Exporting directly to the vendor
The standard OpenTelemetry deployment involves running an OpenTelemetry Collector alongside your application. The Collector is a separate process, usually a sidecar container or a service on the same host. Your application sends telemetry to it over the local network, and the Collector then batches that data and forwards it to the vendor.
To keep our infrastructure simple, we bypassed the Collector and exported logs directly from the Ruby SDK to Grafana Cloud. The Scout APM logging gem uses a similar approach and sends logs directly from the app.
Our log volume is small, so the SDK's built-in batching is enough. A Collector is still the better choice if you need buffering, sampling, or scrubbing outside the app.
Setting up the Ruby SDK for logs
... continue reading