Need documentation for a working setup for fileexporter

[Juliaj]

Component(s)

No response

Describe the issue you're reporting

fileexporter is a good choice for debugging, especially with intermittent metrics errors. However, there is no instruction to help set it up. The readme states,

The official opentelemetry-collector-contrib container does not have a writable filesystem by default since it's built using the special from scratch layer. As such, you will need to create a writable directory for the path, potentially by creating writable volumes or creating a custom image.

If users want to explore the path of creating a writable directory for the path, there are a few obstacles on the way.

• No interactive access point to OpenTelemetryCollector pod to discover a proper value for hostPath , i.e. kubectl exec -it doesn't work.
• initContainers is not allowed thus creating custom path is impossible.

Experts, please help document the setup to promote the usage of this good tool.

[github-actions]

Pinging code owners for exporter/file: @atingchen. See Adding Labels via Comments if you do not have permissions to add labels yourself.

[atingchen]

I'll try to add this documentation and would love to see you improve it.

[atingchen]

@Juliaj I'm sorry for replying to you so late.

We will follow the documentation to first install the operator in an existing cluster and then create an OpenTelemetry Collector (otelcol) instance, like:

kubectl apply -f - <<EOF
apiVersion: opentelemetry.io/v1alpha1
kind: OpenTelemetryCollector
metadata:
  name: fileexporter
spec:
  config: |
    receivers:
      otlp:
        protocols:
          grpc:
          http:
    processors:

    exporters:
      logging:
      file:
        path: /data/metrics.json

    service:
      pipelines:
        metrics:
          receivers: [otlp]
          processors: []
          exporters: [logging,file]
  volumes:
    - name: file
      emptyDir: {}
  volumeMounts: 
    - name: file
      mountPath: /data
EOF

[github-actions]

This issue has been inactive for 60 days. It will be closed in 60 days if there is no activity. To ping code owners by adding a component label, see Adding Labels via Comments, or if you are unsure of which component this issue relates to, please ping @open-telemetry/collector-contrib-triagers. If this issue is still relevant, please ping the code owners or leave a comment explaining why it is still relevant. Otherwise, please close it.

Pinging code owners:

• exporter/file: @atingchen

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

[github-actions]

This issue has been closed as inactive because it has been stale for 120 days with no activity.