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Get started

This guide shows you how to use the Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry Java (EDOT Java) to instrument your Java application and send OpenTelemetry data to an Elastic Observability deployment.

Already familiar with OpenTelemetry? It's an explicit goal of this distribution to introduce no new concepts outside those defined by the wider OpenTelemetry community.

New to OpenTelemetry? This section will guide you through the minimal configuration options to get EDOT Java set up in your application. You do not need any existing experience with OpenTelemetry to set up EDOT Java initially. If you need more control over your configuration after getting set up, you can learn more in the OpenTelemetry documentation.

Prerequisites

Before getting started, you'll need somewhere to send the gathered OpenTelemetry data, so it can be viewed and analyzed. EDOT Java supports sending data to any OpenTelemetry protocol (OTLP) endpoint, but this guide assumes you are sending data to an Elastic Observability cloud deployment. You can use an existing one or set up a new one.

Expand for setup instructions

To create your first Elastic Observability deployment:

  1. Sign up for a free Elastic Cloud trial or sign into an existing account.
  2. Go to https://cloud.elastic.co/home.
  3. Click Create deployment.
  4. When the deployment is ready, click Open to visit your Kibana home page (for example, https://{DEPLOYMENT_NAME}.kb.{REGION}.cloud.es.io/app/home#/getting_started).

Install

To get started with EDOT Java:

  1. Download the latest release.
  2. Run EDOT Java using the -javaagent: JVM argument with the path to the EDOT Java jar: 
    java -javaagent:/path/to/agent.jar \
-jar myapp.jar

Send data to Elastic

After installing EDOT Java, configure and initialize it to start sending data to Elastic.

Configure EDOT Java

To configure EDOT Java, at a minimum you'll need your Elastic Observability cloud deployment's OTLP endpoint and authorization data to set the appropriate OTLP_* environment variables:

  • OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT: The full URL of the endpoint where data will be sent.
  • OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS: A comma-separated list of key=value pairs that will be added to the headers of every request. This is typically used for authentication information.

You can find the values of these variables in Kibana's APM tutorial. In Kibana:

  1. Go to Setup guides.
  2. Select Observability.
  3. Select Monitor my application performance.
  4. Scroll down and select the OpenTelemetry option.
  5. The appropriate values for OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT and OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS are shown there. For example: 
    export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=https://my-deployment.apm.us-west1.gcp.cloud.es.io
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS="Authorization=Bearer P....l"

Confirm that EDOT Java is working

To confirm that EDOT Java has successfully connected to Elastic:

  1. Go to APM → Traces.
  2. You should see the name of the service to which you just added EDOT Java. It can take several minutes after initializing EDOT Java for the service to show up in this list.
  3. Click on the name in the list to see trace data.

Note

There may be no trace data to visualize unless you have used your application since initializing EDOT Java.

Next steps