Create a lightweight web app to create a collector config

[pmcollins]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Users may find creating a YAML config for the collector to be challenging and error prone. Once they create a config, it can also be challenging to visualize data flowing through the collector and troubleshoot problems.

Describe the solution you'd like
A lightweight web app that provides guide rails for creating a config, being to the extent possible, point and click. It should also let users see data flowing through the collector so they can make changes to the config and diagnose problems.

Additional context
I have created a proof of concept that solves the above problem and would like feedback about it -- including whether it should be included in the contrib repo at all, or whether it should live in its own repo.

[jpkrohling]

This might be related to: open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector#5943

I would prefer to have a CLI tool first, to be honest.

[damemi]

+1 for a CLI tool, but it could probably share a lot of code with the web app. Visualizations for pipelines could be really useful.

Something really fancy like a package manager for building collectors/configs would be a cool extension of this

[frzifus]

Would be greate to have something like that. CLI or WebApp sounds both great.

cc @esnible

[codeboten]

from sept 28 SIG call, cc @jpkrohling

Based on the call (and following the great demo by @pmcollins), the community is interested in supporting this effort. The suggestion was to have the UI of the component live in a separate repo to avoid including javascript code in the contrib repo.

@tigrannajaryan suggested we needed at least 2 owners for the repository. @pmcollins I'm assuming you would be interested in being one of the owners?

[pmcollins]

Thanks -- yes, I'd be happy to be one of the code owners.

[tigrannajaryan]

@tigrannajaryan suggested we needed at least 2 owners for the repository.

Yes, to ensure long-term maintenance and simply to make sure someone can approve the PRs. You can't review, approve and merge your own PRs :-)

[cartermp]

Love this effort. Another thought here is that this (or something like this) could live on the website as well, and/or be linked to from the collector docs that get significant traffic. Although we can link to tools external to the website in the interim, it's far less friction for end-users to have any web-based tool hosted on the site in the long-term. But in the interest of incremental progress, I wholly endorse:

• Getting a tool that creates the config easily out into the world as quickly as possible
• Reworking relevant parts of the docs so that this tool is linked to as a recommended option
• Figuring out the right technical path for the website to be able to host such a tool, especially after it's been vetted by several end-users

[svrnm]

I wanted to say what @cartermp said, but he used better words, so 💯

I would prefer to have a CLI tool first, to be honest.

Can we still make sure that this is also going to happen? @neelayu invested lots of effort into that, and the CLI is still the way to go for many people :-)

[jpkrohling]

from sept 28 SIG call, cc @jpkrohling

I circulated this internally and will ping @pmcollins in case someone is interested in helping with the frontend parts.

[smithclay]

If there's interest on reusing/integration for the the web frontend, recently experimented with a web-based config validator here:

• https://github.com/lightstep/otel-config-validator
• https://lightstep.github.io/otel-config-validator/

[github-actions]

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[pmcollins]

It was decided that we don't want this functionality in contrib at this time and that a separate repo should be created for it. For now, this repo will live in the Splunk org, but we can move it to Otel upon request.

[frzifus]

@pmcollins could you link the repo here? :)

[pmcollins]

Yes, when it becomes public. For now it is private pending Splunk approval.