This guide is for anyone who is getting started monitoring their application with OpenTelemetry, and is generating unstructured logs. As is well understood at this point, structured logs are ideal for post-hoc incident analysis and broad-range querying of your data. However, it’s not always feasible to implement highly structured logging at the code level.
With SigNoz, you get some parsing automatically to identify details like timestamp, container ID, container name, and an optional body. But it’s possible to go much deeper with a relatively simple configuration. It’s also a good idea to check for attributes that may contain Personal Identifying Information (PII) and remove them with filters. Since the SigNoz collector is a fork of the OpenTelemetry collector, this tutorial will also work for configuring a baseline OpenTelemetry collector.