Using Dynatrace OpenTelemetry Collector to collect traces to send to Dynatrace

Dapr integrates with the Dynatrace Collector using the OpenTelemetry protocol (OTLP). This guide walks through an example using Dapr to push traces to Dynatrace, using the Dynatrace version of the OpenTelemetry Collector.

Prerequisites

• Install Dapr on Kubernetes
• Access to a Dynatrace tenant and an API token with openTelemetryTrace.ingest, metrics.ingest, and logs.ingest scopes
• Helm

Set up Dynatrace OpenTelemetry Collector to push to your Dynatrace instance

To push traces to your Dynatrace instance, install the Dynatrace OpenTelemetry Collector on your Kubernetes cluster.

1. Create a Kubernetes secret with your Dynatrace credentials:

   kubectl create secret generic dynatrace-otelcol-dt-api-credentials \
     --from-literal=DT_ENDPOINT=https://YOUR_TENANT.live.dynatrace.com/api/v2/otlp \
     --from-literal=DT_API_TOKEN=dt0s01.YOUR_TOKEN_HERE
   

   Replace YOUR_TENANT with your Dynatrace tenant ID and YOUR_TOKEN_HERE with your Dynatrace API token.

2. Use the Dynatrace OpenTelemetry Collector distribution for better defaults and support than the open source version. Download and inspect the collector-helm-values.yaml file. This is based on the k8s enrichment demo and includes Kubernetes metadata enrichment for proper pod/namespace/cluster context.

3. Deploy the Dynatrace Collector with Helm.

   helm repo add open-telemetry https://open-telemetry.github.io/opentelemetry-helm-charts
   helm repo update
   helm upgrade -i dynatrace-collector open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector -f collector-helm-values.yaml
   

Set up Dapr to send traces to the Dynatrace Collector

Create a Dapr configuration file to enable tracing and send traces to the OpenTelemetry Collector via OTLP.

1. Update the following file to ensure the endpointAddress points to your Dynatrace OpenTelemetry Collector service in your Kubernetes cluster. If deployed in the default namespace, it’s typically dynatrace-collector.default.svc.cluster.local.

   Important: Ensure the endpointAddress does NOT include the http:// prefix to avoid URL encoding issues:

    apiVersion: dapr.io/v1alpha1
    kind: Configuration
    metadata:
      name: tracing
    spec:
      tracing:
        samplingRate: "1"
        otel:
          endpointAddress: "dynatrace-collector.default.svc.cluster.local:4318" # Update with your collector's service address
   

2. Apply the configuration with:

   kubectl apply -f collector-config-otel.yaml
   

Deploy your app with tracing

Apply the tracing configuration by adding a dapr.io/config annotation to the Dapr applications that you want to include in distributed tracing, as shown in the following example:

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  ...
spec:
  ...
  template:
    metadata:
      ...
      annotations:
        dapr.io/enabled: "true"
        dapr.io/app-id: "MyApp"
        dapr.io/app-port: "8080"
        dapr.io/config: "tracing"

You can register multiple tracing exporters at the same time, and the tracing logs are forwarded to all registered exporters.

That’s it! There’s no need to include any SDKs or instrument your application code. Dapr automatically handles the distributed tracing for you.

View traces

Deploy and run some applications. After a few minutes, you should see traces appearing in your Dynatrace tenant:

1. Navigate to Search > Distributed tracing in your Dynatrace UI.
2. Filter by service names to see your Dapr applications and their associated tracing spans.

metadata:
  annotations:
    dapr.io/enabled: "true"
    dapr.io/app-id: "MyApp"
    dapr.io/app-port: "8080"
    dapr.io/config: "tracing"
    container.inject.dynatrace.com/daprd: "false" # Exclude dapr sidecar from being auto-monitored by OneAgent

Related links

• Try out the observability quickstart
• Learn how to set tracing configuration options
• Dynatrace OpenTelemetry documentation
• Enrich OTLP telemetry data with Kubernetes metadata