GoKawiilEngineering team ships OpenTelemetry log export in Rails without a Collector
A team integrated the OpenTelemetry Ruby SDK into a Rails application to export logs straight to Grafana Cloud, skipping the usual Collector process entirely. They relied on the SDK's built-in batching since their log volume was low, and required a handful of gems including opentelemetry-sdk and opentelemetry-exporter-otlp-logs.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
By using OTLP, a vendor-neutral format, the app avoids lock-in and can switch observability backends like Datadog or New Relic without code changes. Skipping the Collector simplifies infrastructure for smaller workloads, though teams needing buffering, sampling, or data scrubbing should still deploy one.
- OpenTelemetry's logs, metrics, and traces signals can be adopted independently.
- Direct SDK-to-vendor export avoids running a separate Collector process for low-volume logging.
- Using standard OTLP format keeps applications portable across observability vendors.
O'Reilly "Learning OpenTelemetry" book — If this walkthrough of wiring the OpenTelemetry Ruby SDK into Rails piqued your interest, this O'Reilly book covers the whole picture: logs, metrics, traces, OTLP, and Collector deployment patterns. It's a solid desk reference for teams building vendor-agnostic observability instead of getting locked into one backend.
See O'Reilly "Learning OpenTelemetry" book on Amazon → Affiliate link — we may earn a commission on purchases, at no extra cost to you. Product picked by AI based on this article; it is not a tested recommendation.Source: sixpatterns.com, 2026-08-31
Published there as: “How we configured OpenTelemetry logs in Rails”
Read the original report → The summary and analysis above are GoKawiil's own, written from reporting by the source above. Facts and quotes belong to the original publisher.