How to disable OpenTelemetry Collector in EAR (Elastic Application Runtime)

Products

• VMware Tanzu Platform - Cloud Foundry

Issue/Introduction

Currently the OTEL Collector is enabled and running on port 9564 by default in the EAR (Elastic Application Runtime) tile. You can confirm this by running a command similar to the following.

$ bosh -d  <deployment> ssh <instance_group> -c "sudo ss -tulnp"  | grep  9564
diego_cell/abc123: stdout | tcp   LISTEN 0      4096       127.0.0.1:9564       0.0.0.0:*    users:(("otel-collector",pid=12809,fd=6)) 

Operators might need to disable the OTEL collector in some situations - for example - the OTEL collector process is taking too much CPU resources.

Resolution

Disabling the OTEL collector is supported since EAR v10.2.5 but currently it is not officially documented. 

You can go to OpsManager UI > Tanzu Platform for Cloud Foundry tile > Advanced Features page and set the value of "OpenTelemetry Collector ingress gRPC port" to -1 to disable the OTEL collector. 

Please open a support ticket to the Tanzu support team if you need additional information or help before disabling the setting.