Sending OTLP Data from multiple services

[Dhrumil-Sentry]

Sentry OTLP Proxy Exporter

Summary

This proposal introduces a new Sentry OTLP Proxy Exporter for the OpenTelemetry Collector.

Instead of transforming spans into Sentry’s proprietary envelope format like with the legacy exporter, the new exporter will forward native OTLP traces and logs directly to Sentry’s OTLP ingestion endpoints.

It supports:

• Dynamic routing mode (multi-project, attribute-based routing)
• Optional automatic project creation for first-seen services

Motivation

Sentry now natively ingests OTLP for traces and logs.

The legacy exporter maintained complex span transformation logic, didn’t support logs and required embedding DSNs.

Organisations adopting OTel need:

• a simple way to route telemetry to Sentry
• without custom mapping logic
• without manually managing DSNs across many services
• without coupling application code to Sentry APIs

The new proxy-style OTLP exporter meets those needs.

Design Overview

How it works

1. Collector receives OTLP traces/logs
2. Exporter serializes protobuf
3. Resolves destination project based on service.name attribute
4. Injects x-sentry-auth header
5. Forwards to Sentry’s OTLP endpoint

The exporter supports a dynamic mode, where the project destination get resolved automatically, based on the service.name resource attribute and the org-slug under which all user projects are stored in Sentry. The way this happens is by matching service.name to a canonicalized project-slug with the same name.

• For projects that already exist, the user needs to migrate all project-slug to match the service.name attribute, otherwise dynamic mode will create duplicate projects.
• New projects are created automatically for new services.

Example Configurations

exporters:
  sentry:
    url: https://sentry.io
    org_slug: my-org
    auth_token: $TOKEN
    routing:
      auto_create_projects: true
      project_mapping:
      # manual mapping of the service with the otel `service.name` of `api-service` to the sentry project with the slug `backend-api`.
        api-service: backend-api

Dynamic mode resolves project ➡️ DSN at startup, caches everything, and can create projects on demand. The project.mapping attribute can be also used to manually map services to sentry projects in cases where the service.name does not match the sentry project.

Limitations

• Missing routing attributes e.g. service.name ➡️ batch dropped
• High project counts cause many DSN lookups on startup
• No self-hosted support
• Exporter does not yet maintain trace connectedness OOTB (requires upcoming Sentry Go OTLPIntegration

Feedback Welcome 🗣️

We’re working on shipping the new exporter very soon:

We’d love to hear your feedback about the following

• flexibility of mapping service.name to sentry projects
• migrating already existing projects to match the exporters conventions