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Libhoney Receiver

Status Available in: contrib Maintainers: @TylerHelmuth, @mterhar Source: opentelemetry-collector-contrib

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Supported Telemetry

Logs Traces

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Overview

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Configuration

The configuration has 2 parts, One is the HTTP receiver configuration and the rest is about mapping attributes from the freeform libhoney format into the more structured OpenTelemetry objects.

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Example configuration for the component

The following settings are required:
  • http
    • endpoint must set an endpoint. Defaults to 127.0.0.1:8080
    • compression_algorithms (optional): List of supported compression algorithms. Defaults to ["", "gzip", "zstd", "zlib", "deflate"]. Set to [] to disable automatic decompression.
  • resources: if the service.name field is different, map it here.
  • scopes: to get the library.name and library.version set in the scope section, set them here.
  • attributes: if the other trace-related data have different keys, map them here, defaults are otlp-like field names.
The following setting is required for refinery traffic since:
  • auth_api: should be set to https://api.honeycomb.io or a proxy that forwards to that host. Some libhoney software checks /1/auth to get environment names so it needs to be passed through.
  libhoney:
    http:
      endpoint: 0.0.0.0:8088
      traces_url_paths:
        - "/1/events"
        - "/1/batch"
      include_metadata: true
    auth_api: https://api.honeycomb.io
    fields:
      resources:
        service_name: service_name
      scopes:
        library_name: library.name
        library_version: library.version
      attributes:
        trace_id: trace_id
        parent_id: parent_id
        span_id: span_id
        name: name
        error: error
        spankind: span.kind
        durationFields:
          - duration_ms

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Compression Support

The receiver supports automatic decompression of compressed request bodies using confighttp.ServerConfig defaults.

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Disabling Compression

If you’re experiencing issues with clients that send incorrect Content-Encoding headers (claiming data is compressed when it’s not), you can disable automatic decompression: 
receivers:
  libhoney:
    http:
      endpoint: 0.0.0.0:8088
      compression_algorithms: []  # Disable all automatic decompression

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Custom Compression Algorithms

You can specify exactly which compression algorithms to support: 
receivers:
  libhoney:
    http:
      endpoint: 0.0.0.0:8088
      compression_algorithms: ["gzip", "zstd"]  # Only support gzip and zstd

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Telemetry data types supported

It will subscribe to the Traces and Logs signals but accept traffic destined for either pipeline using one http receiver component. Libhoney does not differentiate between the two so the receiver will identify which pipeline to deliver the spans or log records to. No support for metrics since they’d look just like logs.
Last generated: 2026-04-13