Advanced Reporters

The advanced report provides an alternative way to submit the agent collected data to the backend. All of them are in the optional-reporter-plugins folder, move the one you needed into the reporter-plugins folder for the activation. Notice, don’t try to activate multiple reporters, that could cause unexpected fatal errors.

Kafka Reporter

The Kafka reporter plugin support report traces, JVM metrics, Instance Properties, and profiled snapshots to Kafka cluster, which is disabled in default. Move the jar of the plugin, kafka-reporter-plugin-x.y.z.jar, from agent/optional-reporter-plugins to agent/plugins for activating.

If you configure to use compression.type such as lz4, zstd, snappy, etc., you also need to move the jar of the plugin, lz4-java-x.y.z.jar or zstd-jni-x.y.z.jar or snappy-java.x.y.z.jar, from agent/optional-reporter-plugins to agent/plugins.

Notice, currently, the agent still needs to configure GRPC receiver for delivering the task of profiling. In other words, the following configure cannot be omitted.

# Backend service addresses.
collector.backend_service=${SW_AGENT_COLLECTOR_BACKEND_SERVICES:127.0.0.1:11800}

# Kafka producer configuration
plugin.kafka.bootstrap_servers=${SW_KAFKA_BOOTSTRAP_SERVERS:localhost:9092}
plugin.kafka.get_topic_timeout=${SW_GET_TOPIC_TIMEOUT:10}

Before you activated the Kafka reporter, you have to make sure that Kafka fetcher of OAP server has been opened in service.

Advanced Kafka Producer Configurations

Kafka reporter plugin support to customize all configurations of listed in here. For example:

plugin.kafka.producer_config[delivery.timeout.ms]=12000

Since SkyWalking 8.8.0, support to configure advanced Producer configurations in JSON format, like this:

plugin.kafka.producer_config_json={"delivery.timeout.ms": 12000, "compression.type": "snappy"}

Currently, there are 2 ways to configure advanced configurations below. Notice that, the new way, configured in JSON format, will be overridden by plugin.kafka.producer_config[key]=value when they have the duplication keys.