Forwarder¶

The forwarder is a small Go service that receives spans and log records from the extension over UDP (compact msgpack), batches them, and forwards them to your OTLP collector over HTTP. Spans go to /v1/traces; log records go to /v1/logs.

Running¶

DockerFrom source

docker run -d --name akari-forwarder \
  -p 4319:4319/udp \
  -e OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://jaeger:4318 \
  ghcr.io/shyim/akari/akari-forwarder:latest

cd forwarder
go build -o akari-forwarder ./cmd/akari-forwarder
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:4318 ./akari-forwarder

Configuration¶

The forwarder is configured entirely through environment variables.

Env variable	Default	Description
`OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT`	`http://localhost:4318`	Collector endpoint
`OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS`	(none)	Comma-separated `key=value` headers added to every request (e.g. `api-key=secret`); values are percent-decoded
`OTEL_FORWARDER_LISTEN`	`127.0.0.1:4319`	UDP listen address
`OTEL_FORWARDER_BUFFER_SIZE`	`16384`	Max queued payloads
`OTEL_FORWARDER_BATCH_SIZE`	`64`	Payloads per flush
`OTEL_FORWARDER_FLUSH_INTERVAL`	`100ms`	Max batching window

Matching the extension

OTEL_FORWARDER_LISTEN must match the extension's akari.udp_host / akari.udp_port settings. The defaults line up (127.0.0.1:4319) for a forwarder running on the same host as PHP.

Sending to an authenticated backend¶

For hosted collectors that require an API key, pass it via OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS:

OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=https://api.honeycomb.io \
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS=x-honeycomb-team=YOUR_API_KEY \
./akari-forwarder