Product Spotlight: Logz.io Telemetry Collector for Fast Data Shipping

Today we’re excited to announce Logz.io Telemetry Collector – an agent that can send logs, metrics, and traces to Logz.io in a single installation as part of our Open 360™ platform. 

With Telemetry Collector, customers can get started monitoring their services with Logz.io faster than ever by simplifying the data collection process.

Why we built Logz.io’s Telemetry Collector

To gain observability into your cloud workloads, the first step is to collect your telemetry data—usually consisting of logs, metrics, and/or traces—and send them to an observability back-end. Without this data, engineering teams are blind to health and performance issues impacting the customer experience, let alone how to fix the problem.

Unfortunately, collecting this data has become increasingly difficult as systems become more distributed, dynamic, and complex—thanks largely to Kubernetes. How do you collect data from a container that exists for a half a second?

This is where open source monitoring technologies have risen to the challenge. 

Tools like Prometheus, Fluentd, and OpenTelemetry easily integrate with cloud-native environments, while automatically discovering services as they’re created and destroyed. At Logz.io, we’ve built a service around these kinds of open source monitoring tools that are more effective, easier to use, and less time-consuming to manage.

However, for teams collecting their logs, metrics, and traces, implementing three separate open source tool sets for data collection can be time-consuming to configure and troubleshoot. So, we wanted to provide an easier way to begin sending data to Logz.io.

That’s exactly what Logz.io’s Telemetry Collector does. With two minutes of configuration and a single installation, the Collector can send all of your telemetry data to Logz.io for storage and analysis. The result is that customers can remove data collection complexity and begin monitoring new services faster than ever.

Staying true to our open source roots, this technology is based on the OpenTelemetry Collector—you can explore the project in GitHub here.

How to install the Telemetry Collector: Send telemetry data to Logz.io in less than five minutes

To get started sending your logs, metrics, and/or traces to Logz.io, you can begin a free trial through our website. If you already have a Logz.io account, go to the ‘Send your data’ page in one of the left product toolbars and hit the ‘Start Collecting’ button at the top of the page (see the second image below).

Starting a free trial:

Using an existing account:

Now it’s time to configure the Telemetry Collector. All we have to do is follow the steps on the screen—starting with selecting what we want to monitor. Currently, Telemetry Collector can integrate with:

• Your local host: this integration is used most often to test Logz.io. Quickly and easily get data from your local host into Logz.io to explore our analysis capabilities.
• Kubernetes (AKS, EKS, or GKE): See all of your critical Kubernetes health and performance metrics together, alongside logs and traces to explore the root cause of challenges. Telemetry Collector also automatically discovers the application running on Kubernetes and parses the application logs.
• AWS EC2: Quickly deploy the Telemetry Collector to begin monitoring your EC2s.
• AWS CloudWatch: Already collecting logs and metrics with CloudWatch? Deploy the Telemetry Collector to easily forward them to Logz.io.

We will continuously release more integrations with popular cloud technologies in the near future.

In this example, let’s install the Telemetry Collector on a local host.

Next, we can determine our data source. For logging, we can edit the default path and add multiple paths if needed. Metrics are enabled by default. We don’t see traces here because we will not need trace data to monitor and troubleshoot our local host. Now let’s click ‘Next’.

We can now give our Collector a name, a description, and determine which Logz.io accounts we’d like to store the data for analysis. Now let’s hit ‘Generate snippet’.

Copy the snippet and deploy it in our Terminal (second image). From this page, we can go straight to the Logz.io platform to see our data coming in, or install a dashboard bundle for popular cloud technologies.

After about 30 seconds, we can see our data arrive in our Logz.io account for analysis.

And that’s how you begin sending data to Logz.io in minutes.

Logz.io Telemetry Collector and Kubernetes 360 – Zero to full Kubernetes monitoring in minutes.

Logz.io’s Kubernetes 360 is another exciting product we’re launching this week. It provides a full overview of Kubernetes health and performance in one interactive dashboard—using log, metric, and trace data.

Telemetry Collector and Kubernetes 360 combine to make a truly seamless Kubernetes monitoring experience. Deploy the agent in minutes, and your data will auto-populate Kubernetes 360 so you can begin getting insights from your clusters.

Try it today using Logz.io’s free trial.