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Quickstart for Docker on Elastic Cloud Serverless

Elastic Stack Serverless Observability

Learn how to set up the EDOT Collector and EDOT SDKs in a Docker environment with Elastic Cloud Serverless to collect host metrics, logs, and application traces.

Make sure the following requirements are present:

  • Docker installed and running.
  • The System integration is installed in Kibana. Select Add integration only to skip the agent installation, as only the integration assets are required.

Use the Add data screen in Elastic Observability to generate install commands that are already configured with the values you need.

  1. Open Elastic Observability.
  2. Go to Add data.
  3. Select what you want to monitor.
  4. Follow the instructions.

Follow these steps to deploy the EDOT Collector and EDOT OTel SDKs in Docker with Elastic Cloud Serverless.

  1. Create the config file

    Create a otel-collector-config.yml file with your EDOT collector configuration. Refer to the configuration reference for "Managed OTLP Endpoint" for more details.

  2. Retrieve your settings

    Follow these steps to retrieve the managed OTLP endpoint URL for your Serverless project:

    1. In Elastic Cloud, open your Observability project.
    2. Go to Add data, Application, OpenTelemetry.
    3. Select Managed OTLP Endpoint in the second step.
    4. Copy the OTLP endpoint configuration value.
    5. Select Create API Key to generate an API key.

  3. Create the .env file

    Create a .env file with the following content, replacing the placeholder values with your actual Elastic Cloud credentials:

    HOST_FILESYSTEM=/
DOCKER_SOCK=/var/run/docker.sock
ELASTIC_AGENT_OTEL=true
COLLECTOR_CONTRIB_IMAGE=elastic/elastic-agent:9.0.2
ELASTIC_API_KEY=<your_api_key_here>
ELASTIC_OTLP_ENDPOINT=<your_endpoint_here>
OTEL_COLLECTOR_CONFIG=/path/to/otel-collector-config.yml

  4. Create the compose file

    Create a compose.yml file with the following content:

    services:
   otel-collector:
   image: ${COLLECTOR_CONTRIB_IMAGE}
   container_name: otel-collector
   deploy:
      resources:
         limits:
         memory: 1.5G
   restart: unless-stopped
   command: ["--config", "/etc/otelcol-config.yml" ]
   network_mode: host
   user: 0:0
   volumes:
      - ${HOST_FILESYSTEM}:/hostfs:ro
      - ${DOCKER_SOCK}:/var/run/docker.sock:ro
      - ${OTEL_COLLECTOR_CONFIG}:/etc/otelcol-config.yml
   environment:
      - HOST_FILESYSTEM
      - ELASTIC_AGENT_OTEL
      - ELASTIC_API_KEY
      - ELASTIC_OTLP_ENDPOINT
      - STORAGE_DIR=/usr/share/elastic-agent

  5. Start the Collector

    Start the collector by running:

    docker compose up -d

  6. (Optional) Instrument your applications

    To collect telemetry from applications running on the host where you installed the EDOT Collector, instrument your target applications:

    Configure your SDKs to send the data to the local EDOT Collector using OTLP/gRPC (http://localhost:4317) or OTLP/HTTP (http://localhost:4318).

The following issues might occur.

The following error is due to an improperly formatted API key:

Exporting failed. Dropping data.
{"kind": "exporter", "data_type": }
"Unauthenticated desc = ApiKey prefix not found"

Format your API key as "Authorization": "ApiKey <api-key-value-here>" or "Authorization=ApiKey <api-key>" depending on whether you're using a Collector or SDK.

The managed endpoint has per-project rate limits in place. If you reach this limit, contact our support team.