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This How To takes you through configuring the OpenTelemetry (otel) collector to read metrics and export to Grafana cloud using cloud provided credentials. This guide is part of the Soil Moisture Exporter series.
Prerequisites
- Grafana Cloud account
- OTel Collector installed
Authentication & OTLP Metrics Endpoint
To authenticate you’ll use a token associated with your Grafana Cloud instance ID. In oder to get this:
- Go to your Grafana Cloud portal → My Account (this is grafana.com not your actual Grafana UI instance)
- Under your stack, choose Configure under OpenTelemetry
- It shows your endpoint URL, instance ID, and lets you generate an API token
- Use the above values in your OTel collector configuration file
Configuration
The config for the OTel collector should be:
Note: Update soilconsumer:2112 to match your own exporter's hostname and port.
---
receivers:
prometheus: # Scrape from the prometheus endpoint of the soil moisture exporter
config:
scrape_configs:
- job_name: "moisture_collector"
scrape_interval: 15s
static_configs:
- targets: ["soilconsumer:2112"] # Hostname of the soil-moisture-exporter based on the docker compose service name
hostmetrics: # Also scrape some host metrics e.g. CPU load/memory usage
scrapers:
load:
memory:
extensions: # Setup authentication
basicauth/grafana_cloud:
client_auth:
username: "" # Grafana Cloud instance ID e.g. "1208224"
password: "" # Grafana Cloud API key
exporters: # Tell it where to send the data to
otlphttp/grafana_cloud:
endpoint: "" # Grafana Cloud OTLP endpoint e.g. "https://otlp-gateway-prod-us-central1.grafana.net/otel/v1/metrics"
auth:
authenticator: basicauth/grafana_cloud
# Tie it all together
service:
extensions:
[
basicauth/grafana_cloud,
]
pipelines:
metrics:
receivers: [prometheus, hostmetrics]
exporters: [otlphttp/grafana_cloud]Once the configuration is set up restart your OTel Collector. In your Grafana Cloud account, under Explore you can select the Prometheus datasource and should see values for the metrics you are scraping.