You can monitor a Groundplex running on Linux with Datadog or any observability tool that supports OpenTelemetry (OTel). This requires deployment of an OTel collector to gather the metrics and the logs that Groundplex nodes generate.

Prerequisites:

• Find out what your observability tool requires for configuration. For example, Datadog needs an API key.
• Have a few example pipelines available to run on the Groundplex and generate events to view in your tool.

Install the OTel collector

Download and install the OTel collector:

1. Open the OTel collector GitHub page.
2. On each Linux Server that hosts a Groundplex node, download the appropriate installation packages.

   For example, otelcol-contrib_<version>_linux_amd64.deb (for Debian/Ubuntu) or otelcol-contrib_<version>_linux_amd64.rpm (for Red Hat/CentOS/Fedora) for AMD64 architectures.

3. Install the OTel collector by running the packages.
4. Edit the config.yaml file and configure as required by your third-party tool. The section below provides details for Datadog. You can use the example YAML files as starting points.
5. Follow the steps to Configure the firewall and start the OTel collector.

Configure the OTel config YAML file

Obtain your Datadog API key and add it to a .yaml file:

1. Log in to your Datadog account.
2. Navigate to the Organization settings.
3. Click the API keys tab.
4. Copy the API key and save it.
5. Edit the config.yaml file in the /etc/otelcol-contrib/ folder with the following properties. For example, add DD exporter, change logging, verbosity, batch size.

   receivers:
     otlp:
       protocols:
         grpc:
         http:
   
   processors:
     batch:
       send_batch_max_size: 100
       send_batch_size: 10
       timeout: 10s
     attributes:
       actions:
         - key: snaplex.node.name
           value: <node_name>
           action: upsert
             
   exporters:
     data dog:
       api:
         site: <datadog_site>
         key: <DD_api_key>
       logging:
         verbosity: 
             
   service:
     pipeline:
       logs:
         receivers:
         processors:
         exporters:
       metrics:
         receivers: 
         processors: 
         exporters:    

6. Replace the properties in angle brackets with your values for the Groundplex node name, Datadog site, and Datadog API key.
7. Save the file.
8. Configure the firewall and start the OTel collector as described in the next section.

Configure the firewall and start the OTel collector

After saving the config.yaml file:

1. On each Linux Server, configure the Linux Defender Firewall to open ports 4317, 4318, and any ports required for additional exporters.
2. Run the following commands with administrator privileges:

   sudo systemctl daemon-reload
   sudo systemctl start otelcol-contrib
   sudo systemctl enable otelcol-contrib

3. Check the command window for the status.
4. Run a few pipelines and wait for the metrics to flow into your tool.
5. Refer to Observe in Datadog for metric examples and Node metric reference for the list of metrics you can collect.