Exporting metrics and traces to Google Cloud’s operations suite

Document updated on Oct 24, 2022

Google Cloud’s operation suite (formerly Stackdriver) aggregates metrics, logs, and events from infrastructure, giving developers and operators a rich set of observable signals that speed root-cause analysis and reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR).

The Opencensus exporter allows you to export metrics and traces to Google Cloud. Enabling it only requires you to add the stackdriver exporter in the opencensus module.

The following configuration snippet sends the data:

{
  "extra_config": {
    "telemetry/opencensus": {
      "sample_rate": 100,
      "reporting_period": 60,
      "enabled_layers": {
        "backend": true,
        "router": true,
        "pipe": true
      },
      "exporters": {
        "stackdriver": {
          "project_id": "my-krakend-project",
          "metric_prefix": "krakend",
          "default_labels": {
            "env": "production"
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

As with all OpenCensus exporters, you can add optional settings in the telemetry/opencensus level:

Then, the exporters key must contain an stackdriver entry with the following properties:

See also the additional settings of the Opencensus module that can be declared.

Authentication to Google Cloud

The exporter searches for the Application Default Credentials. It looks for credentials in the following places, preferring the first location found:

1. A JSON file whose path is specified by the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable.
2. A JSON file in a location known to the gcloud command-line tool (e.g.: $HOME/.config/gcloud/application_default_credentials.json).
3. On Google Compute Engine and Google App Engine flexible environment, it fetches credentials from the metadata server.