sentry-otel-exporter-setup

Configures the OpenTelemetry Collector to send traces and logs to Sentry through the Sentry Exporter component, with support for routing telemetry from multiple services into distinct Sentry projects and optionally creating those projects automatically. It is meant for teams standing up OTel with Sentry, wiring collector pipelines for traces and logs, or consolidating telemetry from several services. The work follows an eight-step checklist: check for an existing collector configuration, verify the collector version and install it if needed, decide on project-creation behavior, write the collector config, add environment-variable placeholders, run the collector, verify the setup, and enable trace connectedness with the OTLPIntegration for Python, Ruby, or Node.js.

The Sentry Exporter requires otelcol-contrib v0.145.0 or later, which can be installed either as a binary downloaded from GitHub releases (platform detected via uname) or as a Docker image. Configuration is bootstrapped from the exporter's published example config and full spec, adding the sentry exporter to the exporters section and to the appropriate traces and logs pipelines. Credentials are referenced through environment variables such as ${env:SENTRY_ORG_SLUG} and ${env:SENTRY_AUTH_TOKEN} rather than hard-coded, and a debug exporter with detailed verbosity can be added temporarily to confirm telemetry is flowing.

Use it when a collector is the central hop between instrumented services and Sentry. Automatic project creation derives projects from service.name and assigns every new project to the first team it finds, so at least one team must already exist. Credential handling is deliberately placeholder-only: keys are scaffolded for the user to fill in, and the workflow never writes real tokens.