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Adding New Exporter

GCM supports multiple exporters, each one is responsible for exporting data to a different destination. To add a new exporter, you'll need to:

  1. Create a file for the new exporter on the exporters folder.

See existing exporters and choose an appropriate name for the new exporter.

  1. Create the exporter class.

Some important things when creating a new exporter class:

  1. @register("<your_exporter_name>") decorator.

This decorator is used to register the exporter with GCM, so you should be able to call it from the CLI with the --sink option:

gcm ... --sink=<your_exporter_name> ...
  1. Arguments to __init__ method.

If you want to send exporter specific arguments at CLI invocation time (or provide them via config files), you can add them to the __init__ method. For example, if you want to send a port argument to the exporter, you can add it to the __init__ method like this:

def __init__(self, *, port: Optional[int] = None) -> None:
    ...

Then you'll be able to call the CLI and send a port:

gcm ... --sink=<your_exporter_name> -o port=9000 ...
  1. Implement the write method.

This method is responsible for exporting the data to the destination. It receives a Log object and a SinkAdditionalParams object.

Log contains the data to be exported as an iterator of dataclasses.

SinkAdditionalParams has a data_type field that tells the exporter if it should treat the data as a LOG or METRIC, see Telemetry types supported by GCM:

  • This is defined at collection time
  • These are commonly used to treat data differently at export time, if needed

To see a real implementation of a simple exporter class and its write method, you can see the stdout exporter here.

After you've completed this step, you should be able to test calling your new exporter from the CLI:

gcm ... --sink=<your_exporter_name> ... # add the following for any required exporter args: -o key=value