OpenTelemetry HTTPcheck Receiver
HTTP Check Receiver is a component of the OpenTelemetry Collector that can be used to perform synthetic checks against HTTP endpoints.
It allows you to monitor the availability and performance of HTTP endpoints by making a request to the specified endpoint.
What is OpenTelemetry Collector?
OpenTelemetry Collector is an agent that pulls telemetry data from systems you want to monitor and export the collected data to an OpenTelemetry backend.
Otel Collector provides powerful data processing capabilities, allowing you to perform aggregation, filtering, sampling, and enrichment of telemetry data. You can transform and reshape the data to fit your specific monitoring and analysis requirements before sending it to the backend systems.
OpenTelemetry httpcheck receiver
HTTP Check receiver is a component of the OpenTelemetry Collector that enables synthetic checks against HTTP endpoints to monitor their availability and performance.
The receiver makes a request to the specified endpoint using the configured method, for example, here is how you can monitor Uptrace availability:
receivers:
httpcheck:
targets:
- endpoint: 'https://api.uptrace.dev/health/status'
method: GET
collection_interval: 15s
exporters:
otlp:
endpoint: otlp.uptrace.dev:4317
headers: { 'uptrace-dsn': '<FIXME>' }
service:
pipelines:
metrics:
receivers: [httpcheck]
processors: [batch]
exporters: [otlp]
You can use this receiver in conjunction with the OpenTelemetry Collector Health Check Extension, which provides an HTTP URL that can be probed to check the status of the OpenTelemetry Collector:
extensions:
health_check:
receivers:
httpcheck:
targets:
- endpoint: 'http://localhost:13133/health/status'
method: GET
collection_interval: 15s
OpenTelemetry Backend
Once the metrics are collected and exported, you can visualize them using a compatible backend system. For example, you can use Uptrace to create dashboards that display metrics from the OpenTelemetry Collector.
Uptrace is an open source APM for OpenTelemetry that supports distributed tracing, metrics, and logs. You can use it to monitor applications and troubleshoot issues.
Uptrace comes with an intuitive query builder, rich dashboards, alerting rules, notifications, and integrations for most languages and frameworks.
Uptrace can process billions of spans and metrics on a single server and allows you to monitor your applications at 10x lower cost.
In just a few minutes, you can try Uptrace by visiting the cloud demo (no login required) or running it locally with Docker. The source code is available on GitHub.
What's next?
Next, you can learn more about configuring OpenTelemetry Collector. To start using OpenTelemetry and Uptrace, see Getting started with Uptrace.
