Process Faro telemetry data before sending it to Grafana Cloud

You can process telemetry data collected with the Faro Web SDK using your own OpenTelemetry Collector before sending it to Grafana Cloud. This approach gives you full control over your data processing pipeline, allowing you to:

Remove sensitive information
Filter out specific signals
Apply custom processing rules

How it works

The processing pipeline includes the following steps:

Receive data in Faro format and convert it into OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) format
Apply custom processing rules
Convert back to Faro format and export to the Faro Collector endpoint

Configuration overview

Review the following information for an overview of the configuration:

Receiver: The Faro receiver accepts telemetry data in Faro format and converts it into OTLP format
Processors:
- Transform processor: Removes sensitive data, such as security numbers, from logs
- Filter processor: Drops all event signals
Exporter: The Faro exporter converts processed OTLP data back to Faro format and sends it to the Faro Collector endpoint
Extensions: The headers setter extension manages the required Grafana Cloud headers

Example configuration

This OpenTelemetry Collector configuration example file:

Removes sensitive information, in this case, security numbers.
Filters out specific event signals

# Tested with OpenTelemetry Collector Contrib v0.128.0
receivers:
  faro:
    include_metadata: true
    cors:
      allowed_origins:
        - '*'
      allowed_headers:
        - 'X-Faro-Session-Id'
        - 'Content-Type'

extensions:
  headers_setter:
    headers:
      - action: insert
        key: X-Faro-Session-Id
        from_context: X-Faro-Session-Id
processors:
  transform:
    error_mode: ignore
    log_statements:
      # The transform processor removes sensitive information by replacing the security number in format QQ123456B from log body
      - replace_pattern(log.body, "[A-Za-z]{2}\\d{6}[A-Za-z]", "***")
  filter:
    error_mode: ignore
    logs:
      log_record:
        # The filter processor drops all events signals
        - 'attributes["kind"] == "event"'

exporters:
  faro:
    endpoint: 'https://faro-collector-prod-eu-west-0.grafana.net/collect/{app-key}'
    auth:
      authenticator: headers_setter

service:
  extensions: [headers_setter]
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers:
        - faro
      exporters:
        - faro
    logs:
      receivers:
        - faro
      processors:
        - transform
        - filter
      exporters:
        - faro

Implement

To use this setup, update your JavaScript initialization code to point to your collector instead of the Faro Collector endpoint.

This example points to the Faro Collector endpoint:

https://faro-collector-prod-eu-west-0.grafana.net/collect/{app-key}

This example represents your own collector:

https://my-collector-host.net/collect

Customize your implementation

The example described in this topic demonstrates basic data processing capabilities. You can extend it using processors from the OpenTelemetry contrib repository to meet your specific requirements.