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Sending traces from Checkly to 3rd party OpenTelemetry backends

Sending your checks as traces to a 3rd party OpenTelemetry backend is a great way to correlate check runs with other telemetry data. It’s also very simple to set up.

1. Flip the “Basic HTTP instrumentation” toggle in the OpenTelemetry integration in your Checkly account.
2. Flip the “Send traces” toggle and provide the trace endpoint URL and API key for your preferred 3rd party OpenTelemetry backend. Done.

After you’ve set this up, Checkly will instrument every HTTP request with a proper traceparent and tracestate header and send every check run as a trace to your 3rd party OpenTelemetry backend.

To help you get started, we collected some example configurations for popular OpenTelemetry vendors below.

1. Make sure you have the Traces feature enabled in your NewRelic account.
2. Grab your NewRelic LICENSE KEY in the Administration > API keys section.
3. Grab the right endpoint URL for your NewRelic account. It should look like https://otlp.nr-data.net. Check the full list of all NewRelic OTel endpoints.

Find all the details in the NewRelic OpenTelemetry documentation.

1. Make sure you have Grafana Tempo installed, running and accessible. If you are running Grafana Cloud, the Tempo datasource is already pre-configured. Find it at Connections > Datasources > Tempo.
2. After installing, grab the Tempo endpoint URL. It should look like https://tempo-eu-west-0.grafana.net/tempo.
3. Under the section Authentication, grab the user and password for the Tempo endpoint.
4. As Tempo uses Basic Authentication, you need to provide the user and password in a Authorization: Basic user:password HTTP header in Checkly integration settings, where the user:password section is base64 encoded. You can use an online tool like base64encode.net to encode your user and password.

Find all the details in the Grafana Tempo OpenTelemetry documentation.

1. Grab the relevant API endpoint from the Honeycomb documentation. It should look like https://api.honeycomb.io/.
2. Grab your Honeycomb Ingest API key from the Account > Team settings > Environments and API keys section.
3. Add the endpoint the Checkly integration settings and provide the API key as an HTTP header x-honeycomb-team with the value of your API key.

Getting started with OpenTelemetry Ingesting traces into Checkly

Last updated on April 30, 2024. You can contribute to this documentation by editing this page on Github