[Website]: EDOT Logs exporter clarifications

[lucabelluccini]

Type of issue

Inaccurate

What documentation page is affected

https://www.elastic.co/docs/reference/opentelemetry/edot-sdks/nodejs/configuration

What happened?

1. Clarifications wrt EDOT SDKs and OTEL_LOGS_EXPORTER for each EDOT SDK

Example: the EDOT NodeJS SDK documents OTEL_LOGS_EXPORTER and one expects it to ship the logs of the instrumented application, at this page.

At this page, we say instead the collection of the logs in K8s is responsability of the filereceiver receiver in the EDOT Collector on the node, in K8s.

2. Explain how to disable the Log harvesting when using auto instrumentation in K8s and standalone

For the time being, the solution is to exclude manually the paths containing the pod name via receivers.filelog.exclude.

Additional info

This likely requires inputs from the EDOT SDK devs & EDOT Collector / K8s helm owners

[lucabelluccini]

Hello @theletterf, not urgent but it might be valuable. This is more customization of the ootb setup.

[theletterf]

@lucabelluccini My understanding is that we're talking of two different things here: one is application logs, and the second is infrastructure logs. I think we should focus this task as a Troubleshooting topic on how to disable/turn off logs collection for Infra.

[theletterf]

@lucabelluccini WDYT above the previous proposal?

[lucabelluccini]

What I think it's happening is that when using the K8s Otel Helm chart, the logs (both infra and application logs) are always harvested by the filereceiver.

Some users are tricked into the fact that they can disable the harvesting of the application logs using the OTEL_LOGS_EXPORTER of EDOT SDKs. Disabling that env var will do nothing.

That's why I would like to document this part.

The solution should also be addressed for host logs.

[theletterf]

We can't document based on assumptions, though. We need engineering to confirm this first. Could you get someone to confirm the solution?

[lucabelluccini]

The solution of using receivers.filelog.exclude is in an internal thread (I'll share privately).

[theletterf]

@lucabelluccini I would add this to all SDK config pages, not just Node. I guess this would also happen with other SDKs, right?

[lucabelluccini]

Yep this seems applicable to all SDKs, but also the main recommended configurations of EDOT Collector might mention this.