An exporter is how data gets sent to different systems/back-ends. Generally, an exporter translates the internal format into another defined format.

Available trace exporters (sorted alphabetically):

• OTLP gRPC
• OTLP HTTP

Available metric exporters (sorted alphabetically):

• OTLP gRPC
• OTLP HTTP

Available log exporters (sorted alphabetically):

• OTLP gRPC
• OTLP HTTP

Available local exporters (sorted alphabetically):

• File
• Logging

The contrib repository has more exporters available in its builds.

Exporters are configured via YAML under the top-level exporters tag.

The following is a sample configuration for the exampleexporter.

exporters:
  # Exporter 1.
  # <exporter type>:
  exampleexporter:
    # <setting one>: <value one>
    endpoint: 1.2.3.4:8080
    # ...
  # Exporter 2.
  # <exporter type>/<name>:
  exampleexporter/settings:
    # <setting two>: <value two>
    endpoint: 0.0.0.0:9211

An exporter instance is referenced by its full name in other parts of the config, such as in pipelines. A full name consists of the exporter type, '/' and the name appended to the exporter type in the configuration. All exporter full names must be unique.

For the example above:

• Exporter 1 has full name exampleexporter.
• Exporter 2 has full name exampleexporter/settings.

Exporters are enabled upon being added to a pipeline. For example:

service:
  pipelines:
    # Valid pipelines are: traces, metrics or logs
    # Trace pipeline 1.
    traces:
      receivers: [examplereceiver]
      processors: []
      exporters: [exampleexporter, exampleexporter/settings]
    # Trace pipeline 2.
    traces/another:
      receivers: [examplereceiver]
      processors: []
      exporters: [exampleexporter, exampleexporter/settings]

When multiple exporters are configured to send the same data (e.g. by configuring multiple exporters for the same pipeline) the exporters will have a shared access to the data. Exporters get access to this shared data when ConsumeTraces/ConsumeMetrics/ConsumeLogs function is called. Exporters MUST NOT modify the pdata.Traces/pdata.Metrics/pdata.Logs argument of these functions. If the exporter needs to modify the data while performing the exporting the exporter can clone the data and perform the modification on the clone or use a copy-on-write approach for individual sub-parts of pdata.Traces/pdata.Metrics/pdata.Logs. Any approach that does not mutate the original pdata.Traces/pdata.Metrics/pdata.Logs is allowed.

Beyond standard YAML configuration as outlined in the individual READMEs above, exporters that leverage the net/http package (all do today) also respect the following proxy environment variables:

• HTTP_PROXY
• HTTPS_PROXY
• NO_PROXY

If set at Collector start time then exporters, regardless of protocol, will or will not proxy traffic as defined by these environment variables.