API overview

This page provides a brief overview of the Observability API and the Telemetry (OTLP) API.

About the Observability API

The Observability API lets you do the following:

  • Configure default settings for observability buckets for projects, folders, and organizations. These settings help you meet your compliance and regulatory requirements. You can configure the following:

    • A default storage location for new observability buckets.
    • For each location, a default Cloud Key Management Service key. That key is used to encrypt new observability buckets.

    For more information, see Set defaults for observability buckets.

  • Configure the observability scope for your project. This scope controls which resources are searched by the explorer pages for log, metric, and trace data. For more information, see Configure observability scopes.

  • List information about the observability buckets in your Google Cloud project. Your trace data is stored in an observability bucket. For information about the data model, see Storage overview.

  • Create a link on a dataset, which lets BigQuery have read access to the dataset. To learn how to create a linked dataset, see Manage storage.

About the Telemetry API

The Telemetry (OTLP) API is an implementation of the OpenTelemetry OTLP Protocol. The Telemetry API provides compatibility and support for the open source OpenTelemetry ecosystem:

  • Logs: The Telemetry API lets you ingest OTLP-formatted log records to your project. For more information, see Write OTLP logs to the Telemetry API.

  • Metrics: The Telemetry API lets you ingest OTLP-formatted metrics into Cloud Monitoring by using the otlphttp exporter and an OpenTelemetry Collector or an OpenTelemetry SDK. For more information, see OTLP metric ingestion overview.

  • Traces: The Telemetry API lets you send OTLP-formatted trace data to your project. Also, the trace limits for the Telemetry API are often more generous than the limits for the Cloud Trace API.

For more information about the Telemetry API, see the following documents: