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):

• 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):

• exporters not configured to mutate the data will have shared access to the data
• exporters with the Capabilities to mutate the data will receive a copy of the data

Exporters access export data when ConsumeTraces/ConsumeMetrics/ConsumeLogs function is called. Unless exporter's capabalities include mutation, the exporter MUST NOT modify the pdata.Traces/pdata.Metrics/pdata.Logs argument of these functions. Any approach that does not mutate the original pdata.Traces/pdata.Metrics/pdata.Logs is allowed without the mutation capability.

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.