What is OTelBin?

OTelBin is Web-based tool to facilitate OpenTelemetry collector configuration editing and verification. It is designed to help you get the most out of the OpenTelemetry Collector.

Focus

OTelBin aims to help developers adopt OpenTelemetry faster and more easily by providing a visual editor and validator for OTel Collector configurations. It comes with a built-in support for the OpenTelemetry community releases and the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry. The full code is available under the Apache 2.0 license on GitHub.

Background

Streamlining OpenTelemetry Collector Configurations has become an important part of modern observability, allowing organizations to gather essential telemetry data for their applications and services using high-quality, open-source standards.

The OpenTelemetry Collector is a central component of the OpenTelemetry project, designed to simplify and standardize the collection, processing, and exporting of telemetry from distributed systems and applications. It acts as an agent and a proxy between instrumentation and telemetry backend systems, providing a unified way to gather, process, and export observability data.

The OpenTelemetry Collector has a modular and extensible architecture that allows users to select, configure, and extend components to suit their specific observability needs. It provides a variety of built-in components (processors, exporters, receivers, and connectors) while also supporting custom components. The modularity and versatility of the OpenTelemetry collector, however, make its configuration complex and error-prone, especially for those new to it.

OTelBin is here to help you with this complexity. Its user-friendly interface, real-time visualization and validation capabilities, and a range of features tailored for beginners and experts will simplify how you work with OpenTelemetry collectors and reduce frustrating trial-and-error experiences.

OTelBin main features

Visual configuration

‍OTelBin provides an intuitive visual representation of your OpenTelemetry collector configuration. It allows you to say goodbye to trying to make sense of endless lines of YAML. It will help you see your data flow at a glance and make changes effortlessly.

Code editor with syntax highlighting

‍OTelBin includes a built-in code editor with syntax highlighting, code completion, and basic validation (YAML validity, basic collector principles like that you must declare the receivers you reference). This allows you to get the best of both worlds with code-based configuration and a visual representation of your configured pipelines.

Real-time synchronization

‍The visual diagram instantly reflects changes in the code editor.

Opt-in version-specific validation

‍Depending on which components are included in a collector binary and the versions of its components, there are many version-specific aspects to fully validating a configuration. There is support for OTelBin distributions (e.g., the official contrib and core builds) and their versions. OTelBin already supports both official builds of the OpenTelemetry collector and the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry, with hopes for more distributions in the future with the help of their maintainers.

Share configurations with ease

‍OTelBin supports effortless collaboration with your colleagues by generating shareable URLs for your configurations.