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Googlecloudpubsub Exporter

Status Available in: contrib Maintainers: @alexvanboxel Source: opentelemetry-collector-contrib

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Supported Telemetry

Logs Metrics Traces

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Overview

⚠️ This is a community-provided module. It has been developed and extensively tested at Collibra, but it is not officially supported by GCP.
This exporter sends OTLP messages to a Google Cloud Pubsub topic. The following configuration options are supported:
  • project (Optional): The Google Cloud Project of the topics.
  • topic (Required): The topic name to send OTLP data over. The topic name should be a fully qualified resource name (eg: projects/otel-project/topics/otlp).
  • compression (Optional): Set the payload compression, only gzip is supported. Default is no compression.
  • watermark Behaviour of how the ce-time attribute is set (see watermark section for more info)
    • behavior (Optional): current sets the ce-time attribute to the system clock, earliest sets the attribute to the smallest timestamp of all the messages.
    • allow_drift (Optional): The maximum difference the ce-time attribute can be set from the system clock. When the drift is set to 0, the maximum drift from the clock is allowed (only applicable to earliest).
  • endpoint (Optional): Override the default Pubsub Endpoint, useful when connecting to the PubSub emulator instance or switching between global and regional service endpoints.
  • insecure (Optional): Allows performing “insecure” SSL connections and transfers, useful when connecting to a local emulator instance. Only has effect if Endpoint is not ""
  • ordering: Configures the PubSub ordering feature, see ordering section for more info.
    • enabled (default = false): Enables the ordering. Default is disabled.
    • from_resource_attribute (no default): resource attribute that will be used as the ordering key. Required when ordering.enabled is true. If the resource attribute is missing or has an empty value, the messages will not be ordered for this resource.
    • remove_resource_attribute (default = false): if the ordering key resource attribute specified from_resource_attribute should be removed from the resource attributes.
  • traces, metrics and logs (Optional): Allows overriding the standard OTLP Protobuf encoding and the message attributes. attributes.
    • encoding (Optional): An encoding extension, if not specified it uses the default Protobuf marshaller.
    • attributes (Optional): Attributes that will be added to the Pub/Sub message.
exporters:
  googlecloudpubsub:
    project: my-project
    topic: projects/my-project/topics/otlp-traces

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Pubsub topic

The Google Cloud Pubsub exporter doesn’t automatically create topics, it expects the topic to be created upfront. Security wise it’s best to give the collector its own service account and give the topic Pub/Sub Publisher permission.

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Messages

The message published on the topic are CloudEvent compliance and uses the binary content mode defined in the Google Cloud Pub/Sub Protocol Binding for CloudEvents . The data field is either a ExportTraceServiceRequest, ExportMetricsServiceRequest or ExportLogsServiceRequest for traces, metrics or logs respectively. Each message is accompanied by the following attributes:
attributesdescription
ce-specversionFollow version 1.0 of the CloudEvent spec
ce-sourceThe source is this /opentelemetry/collector/googlecloudpubsub/<version> exporter
ce-ida random UUID to uniquely define the message
ce-timea watermark indicating when the events, encapsulated in the OTLP message, where generated. The behavior will depend on the watermark setting in the configuration
ce-typedepending on the data org.opentelemetry.otlp.traces.v1, org.opentelemetry.otlp.metrics.v1 or org.opentelemetry.otlp.logs.v1
content-typethe content type is application/protobuf
content-encodingindicates that payload is compressed. Only gzip compression is supported

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Compression

By default, the messages are not compressed. By compressing the messages, the cost of Pubsub can be reduced to up to 20% of the cost. This can be done by setting the compression to gzip. 
exporters:
  googlecloudpubsub:
    project: my-project
    topic: projects/my-project/topics/otlp-traces
    compression: gzip
The exporter will add the content-encoding attribute to the message. The receiver will look at this attribute to detect the compression that is used on the payload. Only gzip is supported.

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Watermark

A watermark is a threshold that indicates where streaming processing frameworks (like Apache Beam) expects all the data in a window to have arrived. If new data arrives with a timestamp that’s in the window but older than the watermark, the data is considered late data. The watermark section will change the behaviour of the ce-time attribute of the message. If you don’t use such frameworks you can ignore the section and the ce-time will be set to the current time, but to have a more reliable watermark behaviour in such streaming it’s better to set the ce-time attribute to the earliest timestamp of the messages embedded in the Pubsub message. Setting the behaviour to earliest will scan all the embedded message before sending the actual Pubsub message to figure out what the earliest timestamp is. You have to set allow_drift, the allowed maximum for the ce-time timestamp , if you want to behaviour to have effect as the default is 0s. 
exporters:
  googlecloudpubsub:
    project: my-project
    topic: projects/my-project/topics/otlp-traces
    watermark: 
      behavior: earliest
      allow_drift: 1h
The default behavior is that the watermark is set to the current time of the processor. This timestamp will not differ that much as the timestamp that is attached to a Pubsub message. Most users that don’t do anything outside using Pubsub as a global distribution system will not need anything else. If you use Google Cloud Dataflow and want to rely on the advanced streaming feature you may want to change the behavior of the watermark and de-duplication. You can leverage the unique id (ce-id) and a timestamp (ce-time) attributes on the message. In Apache Beam (the framework used by Dataflow) you can set the attributes names on the Pubsub connector via the .withTimestampAttribute("ce-time") and .withIdAttribute("ce-id") methods. A good settings for this scenario is behavior: earliest with a reasonable allow_drift of 1h. Allowed behavior values are current or earliest. For allow_drift the default is 0s, so make sure to set the value.

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Ordering

When ordering is enabled (ordering.enabled), you are required to specify a resource attribute key that will be used as the ordering key (ordering.from_resource_attribute). If this resource attribute is only meant to be used as an ordering key, you may want to choose to get this resource attribute key (ordering.from_resource_attribute) removed before publishing to PubSub by enabling the ordering.remove_resource_attribute configuration. 
exporters:
  googlecloudpubsub:
    project: my-project
    topic: projects/my-project/topics/otlp-traces
    ordering:
      enabled: true
      from_resource_attribute: some.resource.attribute.key
      remove_resource_attribute: true

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Notes

While the PubSub topic doesn’t require any configuration for ordering, you will need to enable ordering on your subscription(s) if you need it. Enabling ordering on a subscription is only possible at creation. For composite ordering keys you’d need to compose the resource attribute value before exporting e.g., by using a transform processor . Empty values in the ordering key are accepted but won’t be ordered, see PubSub ordering documentation for more details. PubSub requires one publish request per ordering key value, so this exporter groups the signals per ordering key before publishing.

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Encoding and message attributes

The traces, metrics and logs section allows you to specify Encoding Extensions for marshalling the messages on the topic and the attributes on the Pub/Sub message. All the signals have the same config options. It’s important to note that when you use an extension all the CloudEvent attributes are removed as you use your own encoder as the exporter can’t know what valute to set. You have the opportunity to manually set them. 
extensions:
  otlp_encoding:
    protocol: otlp_json

exporters:
  googlecloudpubsub:
    project: my-project
    topic: projects/my-project/topics/otlp-traces
    traces:
      encoding: otlp_encoding
      attributes:
        "ce-type": "org.opentelemetry.otlp.traces.v1"
        "content-type": "application/json"
The encoding option allows you to specify Encoding Extensions for marshalling the messages on the topic. An extension need to be configured in the extensions section, and added to pipeline in the collectors configuration file. The attributes option allows you to set any attributes, the values are key/value pairs. You can avoid the removal of CloudEvent attributes if you manually specify the ce-type and content-type to an appropriate value for the chosen encoding.

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Configuration

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Example Configuration

googlecloudpubsub:
googlecloudpubsub/customname:
  project: my-project
  user_agent: opentelemetry-collector-contrib {{version}}
  timeout: 20s
  topic: projects/my-project/topics/otlp-topic
  compression: gzip
  watermark:
    behavior: earliest
    allowed_drift: 1h
  ordering:
    enabled: true
    from_resource_attribute: ordering_key
    remove_resource_attribute: true
Last generated: 2026-04-13