Turn legacy logs into distributed traces w/o touching code | OpenTelemetry connector tutorial

Turn your legacy application logs into visual distributed traces — no code changes required.

In this video, I walk through a custom OpenTelemetry Collector Connector I built that takes plain text logs, groups them by a shared key (like userID or sessionID), and emits OpenTelemetry spans as a single trace. You can then view these traces in Jaeger, Zipkin, or any OTel-compatible backend.

Why this matters: Most legacy applications can't or won't be instrumented with OpenTelemetry. But those logs sitting on your server right now? They're actually broken traces — they just don't know it yet. This connector bridges that gap.

What you'll learn:

* How the logs-to-spans connector groups logs by key and creates trace spans
* How to configure the OpenTelemetry Collector with the connector

Links:

* GitHub (code, sample configs, builder-config): https://github.com/agardnerIT/logs-to-spans-otel
* CNCF Ambassador Profile: https://www.cncf.io/people/ambassadors/?p=adam-gardner&_sf_s=adam+gardner
* LinkedIn (connect with me): https://www.linkedin.com/in/agardner1

The connector is Apache 2.0 licensed and contributions are welcome. When stable, I plan to donate this to the OpenTelemetry project so it can be included in the contrib distribution.

#OpenTelemetry #Observability #DistributedTracing #LegacySystems #DevOps #SRE #Logs #Traces #OTel

Видео Turn legacy logs into distributed traces w/o touching code | OpenTelemetry connector tutorial канала Adam Gardner