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Opencensus Receiver

Status Source: opentelemetry-collector-contrib

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Overview

Status
Stabilitybeta
Supported pipeline typestraces, metrics
Distributionscore, contrib
Receives data via gRPC or HTTP using OpenCensus format.

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Getting Started

All that is required to enable the OpenCensus receiver is to include it in the receiver definitions. 
receivers:
  opencensus:
The following settings are configurable:

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Advanced Configuration

Several helper files are leveraged to provide additional capabilities automatically:

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Writing with HTTP/JSON

The OpenCensus receiver can receive trace export calls via HTTP/JSON in addition to gRPC. The HTTP/JSON address is the same as gRPC as the protocol is recognized and processed accordingly. To write traces with HTTP/JSON, POST to [address]/v1/trace. The JSON message format parallels the gRPC protobuf format, see this OpenApi spec for it. The HTTP/JSON endpoint can also optionally configure CORS, which is enabled by specifying a list of allowed CORS origins in the cors_allowed_origins field: 
receivers:
  opencensus:
    cors_allowed_origins:
    - http://test.com
    # Origins can have wildcards with *, use * by itself to match any origin.
    - https://*.example.com

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Configuration

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Example Configuration

# The following entry initializes the default OpenCensus receiver.
# The default values are specified here
# https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector/blob/71589202609d7e787244076b631b45e219101867/receiver/opencensusreceiver/factory.go#L47-L56
# The full name of this receiver is `opencensus` and can be referenced in pipelines by 'opencensus'.
opencensus:
# The following entry demonstrates configuring the common receiver settings:
# - endpoint
# This configuration is of type 'opencensus' and has the name 'customname' with a full name of 'opencensus/customname'
# ('<type>/<name>'. To reference this configuration in a pipeline, use the full name `opencensus/customname`.
opencensus/customname:
  # The receiver will listen on endpoint: "0.0.0.0:9090".
  endpoint: 0.0.0.0:9090
# The following entry configures all of the keep alive settings. These settings are used to configure the receiver.
opencensus/keepalive:
  keepalive:
    server_parameters:
      max_connection_idle: 11s
      max_connection_age: 12s
      max_connection_age_grace: 13s
      time: 30s
      timeout: 5s
    enforcement_policy:
      min_time: 10s
      permit_without_stream: true
# The following demonstrates how to set maximum limits on stream, message size and connection idle time.
# Note: The test yaml has demonstrated configuration on a grouped by their structure; however, all of the settings can
# be mix and matched like adding the maximum connection idle setting in this example.
opencensus/msg-size-conc-connect-max-idle:
  max_recv_msg_size_mib: 32
  max_concurrent_streams: 16
  read_buffer_size: 1024
  write_buffer_size: 1024
  keepalive:
    server_parameters:
      max_connection_idle: 10s
# The following entry demonstrates how to specify TLS credentials for the server.
# Note: These files do not exist. If the receiver is started with this configuration, it will fail.
opencensus/tlscredentials:
  tls:
    cert_file: test.crt
    key_file: test.key
# The following entry demonstrates how to specify a Unix Domain Socket for the server.
opencensus/uds:
  transport: unix
  endpoint: /tmp/opencensus.sock
# The following entry demonstrates how to configure the OpenCensus receiver to allow Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS).
# Both fully qualified domain names and the use of wildcards are supported.
opencensus/cors:
  cors_allowed_origins:
    - https://*.test.com # Wildcard subdomain. Allows domains like https://www.test.com and https://foo.test.com but not https://wwwtest.com.
    - https://test.com # Fully qualified domain name. Allows https://test.com only.
Last generated: 2026-04-14