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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.
Open source

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 Collector headerssetter 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

river
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:

HierarchyBlockDescriptionRequired
headerheaderCustom 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.

NameTypeDescriptionDefaultRequired
keystringName of the header to set.yes
valuestring or secretValue of the header.no
from_contextstringMetadata name to get header value from.no
actionstringAn 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 that from_context needs to the metadata_keys of the batch processor.
  • otelcol receivers must be configured with include_metadata set to true so that metadata keys are available to the pipeline.

Exported fields

The following fields are exported and can be referenced by other components:

NameTypeDescription
handlercapsule(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:

river
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
  }
}