Caution
Grafana Alloy is the new name for our distribution of the OTel collector. Grafana Agent has been deprecated and is in Long-Term Support (LTS) through October 31, 2025. Grafana Agent will reach an End-of-Life (EOL) on November 1, 2025. Read more about why we recommend migrating to Grafana Alloy.
Important: This documentation is about an older version. It's relevant only to the release noted, many of the features and functions have been updated or replaced. Please view the current version.
otelcol.auth.headers
otelcol.auth.headers
exposes a handler
that can be used by other otelcol
components to authenticate requests using custom headers.
NOTE:
otelcol.auth.headers
is a wrapper over the upstream OpenTelemetry Collectorheaderssetter
extension. Bug reports or feature requests will be redirected to the upstream repository, if necessary.
Multiple otelcol.auth.headers
components can be specified by giving them
different labels.
Usage
otelcol.auth.headers "LABEL" {
header {
key = "HEADER_NAME"
value = "HEADER_VALUE"
}
}
Arguments
otelcol.auth.headers
doesn’t support any arguments and is configured fully
through inner blocks.
Blocks
The following blocks are supported inside the definition of
otelcol.auth.headers
:
Hierarchy | Block | Description | Required |
---|---|---|---|
header | header | Custom header to attach to requests. | no |
header block
The header
block defines a custom header to attach to requests. It is valid
to provide multiple header
blocks to set more than one header.
Name | Type | Description | Default | Required |
---|---|---|---|---|
key | string | Name of the header to set. | yes | |
value | string or secret | Value of the header. | no | |
from_context | string | Metadata name to get header value from. | no | |
action | string | An action to perform on the header | “upsert” | no |
The supported values for action
are:
insert
: Inserts the new header if it does not exist.update
: Updates the header value if it exists.upsert
: Inserts a header if it does not exist and updates the header if it exists.delete
: Deletes the header.
Exactly one of value
or from_context
must be provided for each header
block.
The value
attribute sets the value of the header directly.
Alternatively, from_context
can be used to dynamically retrieve the header value from request metadata.
For from_context
to work, other components in the pipeline also need to be configured appropriately:
- If an
otelcol.processor.batch
is present in the pipeline, it must be configured to preserve client metadata. Do this by adding the value thatfrom_context
needs to themetadata_keys
of the batch processor. otelcol
receivers must be configured withinclude_metadata
set totrue
so that metadata keys are available to the pipeline.
Exported fields
The following fields are exported and can be referenced by other components:
Name | Type | Description |
---|---|---|
handler | capsule(otelcol.Handler) | A value that other components can use to authenticate requests. |
Component health
otelcol.auth.headers
is only reported as unhealthy if given an invalid
configuration.
Debug information
otelcol.auth.headers
does not expose any component-specific debug information.
Example
This example configures otelcol.exporter.otlp to use custom headers:
otelcol.receiver.otlp "default" {
http {
include_metadata = true
}
grpc {
include_metadata = true
}
output {
metrics = [otelcol.processor.batch.default.input]
logs = [otelcol.processor.batch.default.input]
traces = [otelcol.processor.batch.default.input]
}
}
otelcol.processor.batch "default" {
// Preserve the tenant_id metadata.
metadata_keys = ["tenant_id"]
output {
metrics = [otelcol.exporter.otlp.production.input]
logs = [otelcol.exporter.otlp.production.input]
traces = [otelcol.exporter.otlp.production.input]
}
}
otelcol.auth.headers "creds" {
header {
key = "X-Scope-OrgID"
from_context = "tenant_id"
}
header {
key = "User-ID"
value = "user_id"
}
}
otelcol.exporter.otlp "production" {
client {
endpoint = env("OTLP_SERVER_ENDPOINT")
auth = otelcol.auth.headers.creds.handler
}
}