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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.

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.

Open source

otelcol.auth.bearer

otelcol.auth.bearer exposes a handler that can be used by other otelcol components to authenticate requests using bearer token authentication.

This extension supports both server and client authentication.

NOTE: otelcol.auth.bearer is a wrapper over the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector bearertokenauth extension. Bug reports or feature requests will be redirected to the upstream repository, if necessary.

Multiple otelcol.auth.bearer components can be specified by giving them different labels.

Usage

river
otelcol.auth.bearer "LABEL" {
  token = "TOKEN"
}

Arguments

otelcol.auth.bearer supports the following arguments:

NameTypeDescriptionDefaultRequired
tokensecretBearer token to use for authenticating requests.yes
schemestringAuthentication scheme name.“Bearer”no

When sending the token, the value of scheme is prepended to the token value. The string is then sent out as either a header (in case of HTTP) or as metadata (in case of gRPC).

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.bearer is only reported as unhealthy if given an invalid configuration.

Debug information

otelcol.auth.bearer does not expose any component-specific debug information.

Examples

Default scheme via gRPC transport

The example below configures otelcol.exporter.otlp to use a bearer token authentication.

If we assume that the value of the API_KEY environment variable is SECRET_API_KEY, then the Authorization RPC metadata is set to Bearer SECRET_API_KEY.

river
otelcol.exporter.otlp "example" {
  client {
    endpoint = "my-otlp-grpc-server:4317"
    auth     = otelcol.auth.bearer.creds.handler
  }
}

otelcol.auth.bearer "creds" {
  token = env("API_KEY")
}

Custom scheme via HTTP transport

The example below configures otelcol.exporter.otlphttp to use a bearer token authentication.

If we assume that the value of the API_KEY environment variable is SECRET_API_KEY, then the Authorization HTTP header is set to MyScheme SECRET_API_KEY.

river
otelcol.exporter.otlphttp "example" {
  client {
    endpoint = "my-otlp-grpc-server:4317"
    auth     = otelcol.auth.bearer.creds.handler
  }
}

otelcol.auth.bearer "creds" {
  token = env("API_KEY")
  scheme = "MyScheme"
}