OpenTelemetry - Painlessly Ship Docker Container Logs to OpenObserve

Using the contrib release of the OpenTelemetry Collector (GitHub) container, you can ship the standard JSON Lines logs generated by the Docker engine to OpenObserve using a container in the self-same stack. This approach is not ideal for a serious production or enterprise deployment but will be sufficient if you have a simple self-hosting use case like mine. The Docker engine writes the stdout and stderr logs from containers (i.e. the output of docker logs <container_id/container_name>) to /var/lib/docker/containers. This directory will contain a directory per container, named for the 64-char hexadecimal container ID, and a log file in each subdirectory named <container_id>-json.log. OTEL Collector contrib is needed to get access to the filelog receiver with support for the docker format. ...

2026-04-06 · 4 min · 645 words · Aidan