Telemetry

GitHub Backup is designed to run as an unattended backup system, requiring minimal human involvement to maintain and operate. To provide visibility into the status of your backups, it includes support for OpenTelemetry tracing which can be used to monitor the health of your backups and ensure that they are running as expected.

By default GitHub Backup will export its telemetry data to the console in a human readable format, however you can configure it to export this data to any OpenTelemetry compatible endpoint by configuring the following environment variables.

Configuration

# Required: configure the endpoint to which telemetry data should be sent
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=https://your-otel-collector:4317

# Optional: configure the protocol to use when sending telemetry data (`grpc`, `http-json`, `http-binary`)
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL=grpc

# Optional: configure headers to be sent to the OTLP endpoint
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS=X-API-KEY=your-api-key

# Optional: configure the sampler to use for tracing data (`always_on`, `always_off`, `traceidratio`)
OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLER=always_on

# Optional: configure the argument to pass to the sampler, used to configure the sampling ratio (a number between 0 and 1)
OTEL_TRACES_SAMPLER_ARG=1.0

Examples

Honeycomb

If you are using Honeycomb.io for your telemetry data, you can configure GitHub Backup to send its telemetry data to your Honeycomb account by setting the following environment variables.

OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT="https://api.honeycomb.io:443"
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS="x-honeycomb-team=<honeycomb_api_key>"

Grafana Cloud

If you are using Grafana Cloud for your telemetry data, you can configure GitHub Backup to send its telemetry data to your Grafana Cloud account by setting the following environment variables.

Tips

This configuration will match the configuration provided to you by Grafana Cloud when configuring OTLP ingestion.

OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT="https://otlp-gateway-prod-eu-west-0.granfa.net/otlp"
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS="Authorization=Basic <base64_encoded_api_key>"
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL="http-binary"