Why Does The Kafka Exporter's Raw Marshaler Marshal Everything Except Raw Bytes To JSON?

[rjduffner]

Component(s)

exporter/kafka

Describe the issue you're reporting

We have a use case where we are receiving application logs from a python webapp and then shipping them off to an S3 bucket and to Kafka.

However, we noticed that the outputs to S3 and Kafka are different for the same logs.

Setting the encoding to body in the awss3exporter, seems to pass through the raw value through without any changes. However, when using the kafka exporter's, raw encoding, the value of the log gets converted to JSON. (https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/blob/main/exporter/kafkaexporter/raw_marshaler.go#L78)

Im not saying this is a bug as the documentation is clear that it will do this but I am just trying to get some context in the difference in behavior.

An input like

2024-04-09 02:31:09,896 INFO  [myapp:42][pid=1][tname=MainThread] message="Hello World", action_type="say.hello"

Would be unchanged in the awss3exporter but yield a result of

"2024-04-09 02:31:09,896 INFO  [myapp:42][pid=1][tname=MainThread] message=\"Hello World\", action_type=\"say.hello\""

in the kafka exporter.

I would suggest a body marshaler (like that in the awss3exporter) but that seems strange when on the kafka recevier there is a specific JSON Unmarshaler and the word "raw" to me means, unchanged.

Thanks for any information!

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Pinging code owners:

• exporter/kafka: @pavolloffay @MovieStoreGuy

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[github-actions]

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Pinging code owners:

• exporter/kafka: @pavolloffay @MovieStoreGuy

See Adding Labels via Comments if you do not have permissions to add labels yourself.