SUSE AI OpenTelemetry Collector

A custom OpenTelemetry Collector distribution built with OCB for monitoring SUSE AI infrastructure.

It is based on the Kubernetes distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector, extended with the Elasticsearch receiver and a custom Topology exporter. It collects traces, metrics, and logs from GenAI components (Ollama, vLLM, Milvus, Open WebUI, etc.), normalizes them with gen_ai.* semantic conventions, and forwards the data to SUSE Observability.

Components

The distribution starts from the opentelemetry-collector-contrib Kubernetes distribution and adds:

• Elasticsearch receiver -- scrapes cluster and node-level metrics from Elasticsearch and OpenSearch instances.
• Topology exporter (custom, in topologyexporter/) -- infers the architectural map of GenAI applications, inference engines, models, vector databases, and search engines from trace data and pushes it to SUSE Observability.

Kubernetes distribution highlights

Because this collector inherits the K8s distribution, it ships with Kubernetes-native receivers and processors out of the box:

Category	Notable components
Receivers	OTLP, Prometheus, Kubernetes Cluster/Events/Objects, Kubelet Stats, File Log, Journald, Host Metrics, Jaeger, Zipkin
Processors	K8s Attributes, Resource Detection, Batch, Memory Limiter, Filter, Transform, Tail Sampling, and more
Exporters	OTLP/HTTP, Debug, File, Load Balancing, OTel Arrow
Extensions	Health Check, K8s Observer, K8s Leader Elector, OAuth2, OIDC Auth, PProf, ZPages
Connectors	Service Graph, Span Metrics, Routing, Count, Failover, Round Robin

See builder-config.yaml for the full component manifest and collector-config.yaml for a reference pipeline configuration.

Building

Requires Go 1.24+ and the OTel Collector Builder:

go install go.opentelemetry.io/collector/cmd/builder@v0.147.0
builder --config builder-config.yaml
cd suse-ai-opentelemetry-collector && go build -o otelcol-custom .

Updating components

The script scripts/update-collector.sh fetches the latest OTel release, downloads the official K8s and contrib manifests, merges in the Elasticsearch receiver and the local Topology exporter, and regenerates builder-config.yaml.

Container image

docker build -f Containerfile -t suse-ai-otelcol .

The image is also published to ghcr.io/SUSE/suse-ai-opentelemetry-collector on every push to main.

Running

./otelcol-custom --config collector-config.yaml

The collector exposes OTLP on ports 4317 (gRPC) and 4318 (HTTP).

Architecture

See ARCH.md for a detailed description of the three-layer observability approach (instrumentation, collection, and virtual topology).