Allow otlphttpexporter to export in JSON format

[songy23]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Currently the otlphttpexporter only supports exporting data in Binary Protobuf Encoding:

opentelemetry-collector/exporter/otlphttpexporter/otlp.go

Line 132 in f2a0133

req.Header.Set("Content-Type", "application/x-protobuf")

While the otlp spec and the otlp http receiver support both binary protobuf encoding and JSON encoding. It will be nice to be able to export telemetry data in JSON using the otlphttpexporter.

Describe the solution you'd like

Add a config to otlphttpexporter like:

exporters:
  otlphttp:
    ...
    encoding: [binary_protobuf | json]

And have the corresponding encoder in otlphttpexporter.

Feel free to mark this as duplicated if there's an existing issue on otlphttpexporter json support.

[bogdandrutu]

We want to discourage use of JSON between collectors (unnecessary overhead). We do accept receiving because JS libraries need that.

[vainiusd]

This was also mentioned in opentelemetry-collector-contrib issue 10836.

It could be useful when sending logs to collectors that do not support OTLP.

[aubm]

Just to mention that I've been trying to send logs collected by the OpenTelemetry Collector to Logstash and it looks like support for Protobuf is limited and I can't get it working properly.

I've just opened an issue on the Github Logstash Protobuf codec plugin repository.
You can find all the details here: logstash-plugins/logstash-codec-protobuf#70

At this point, if I don't find a way to make it work and I can't get otlphttpexporter to offer JSON encoding, which is well supported by Logstash, I'll have to implement my own exporter.
This is a bummer, and probably an obstacle for more people to adopt it as well.

Just give me the go and I'll submit a PR, it'll be short and sweet.

[atoulme]

You could try to use the splunkhec exporter in raw mode to push data over to logstash, that's not really meant for it but might get you what you need. If you can push a test showing the problems with logstash, I'm sure folks here can help on their end.

[tvaintrob]

Is there any update regarding this issue?

I'm facing an issue where I need to connect two collector instances over http using json and protobuf is not an option

Adding more context to this:

I am working in a highly regulated environment where security requirements demand payloads being validated deeply by a web application firewall which does not support reading binary data, i will be happy to provide an implementation for this feature request

[aubm]

Hi @tvaintrob, I ended up starting working on a generic HTTP/JSON exporter.
I might submit a PR to contribute it back eventually if anyone is interested.

The solution suggested by @atoulme to use the splunkhec exporter was interesting, but I couldn't make it work (not sure I remember why exactly, it's been a couple months, but I think it still required me to provide a valid authentication to a splunk server, something like that).

[tvaintrob]

@aubm Thanks for the suggestion! I'll look into that, I also started working on it, I have a fork with the required changes

Hopefully we can push this to the upstream

[songy23]

Looks to me there are enough interests on the otlp http json exporter, I'll bring this up in today's collector SIG

[songy23]

Recap from today's SIG: exporting OTLP in http/json sounds a valid use case. The spec on SDKs JSON support says:

SDKs SHOULD support both grpc and http/protobuf transports and MUST support at least one of them. If they support only one, it SHOULD be http/protobuf. They also MAY support http/json.

It may not be worth adding a new exporter e.g. otlphttpjsonexporter, but instead can add the JSON encoding to the current otlphttpexporter. The implementation should follow https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otlp/#json-protobuf-encoding, there are a few caveats there.

@aubm @tvaintrob would either of you be interested in taking this issue?

[aubm]

Thanks @songy23! I would be happy to take the ball. I can work on that this Friday.

[songy23]

Appreciated @aubm!