otel-collector

This recipe ships data emitted by msb-metrics. See the msb-metrics page for the flag reference, metric names, and deployment constraints.

Run the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector locally with a debug exporter to see exactly what msb-metrics is sending. Useful for development and for verifying metric names, attributes, and protocols before pointing at a real backend.

Install the collector

Download otelcol (or otelcol-contrib) from the official releases, or run via Docker.

Configure the OTLP receiver + debug exporter

Save as otel-collector.yaml:

receivers:
  otlp:
    protocols:
      grpc:
        endpoint: 0.0.0.0:4317
      http:
        endpoint: 0.0.0.0:4318

exporters:
  debug:
    verbosity: detailed

service:
  pipelines:
    metrics:
      receivers: [otlp]
      exporters: [debug]

Start the collector

otelcol --config=otel-collector.yaml

Point msb-metrics at it

msb-metrics otel --endpoint=http://localhost:4317 --log-level=debug

Boot a sandbox (msb run alpine) and watch metrics scroll past in the otel-collector log. You should see records like microsandbox.cpu.utilization with the configured resource and identity attributes attached.

The debug exporter replaced the older logging exporter in otel-collector v0.111.0. If your installation pre-dates that, use exporters.logging instead.

Verbosity levels

The verbosity field controls how much detail the debug exporter prints:

Level	Output
`basic` (default)	one summary line per export
`normal`	summary plus high-level metric names
`detailed`	full datapoint values and all attributes

Use detailed while verifying that attributes and units are correct; drop to basic once you’re confident the pipeline works.

Docker

Guest

Metrics backends

Verbosity levels

Reference

​Verbosity levels

​Reference

Verbosity levels

Reference