Forwarding Solace Insights Metrics and Logs

You may already have a preferred observability platform for monitoring your infrastructure and would like to monitor your event broker services from that platform. With an Solace Insights subscription, and Insights Forwarding, you can forward the metrics and logs Solace collects while monitoring the event broker services in your estate to an observability platform of your choice, such as Dynatrace, or Splunk.

Forwarding your Insights metrics and logs benefits you by centralizing the Insights data alongside any other data you collect from your infrastructure or systems. Having your data centralized in one observability platform allows your application teams to make sense of it with tools they are already familiar with.

You can optionally forward metrics and logs to your own Datadog account, as a controlled availability feature. For more information, see Forwarding Solace Insights Metrics and Logs to Your Own Datadog Account.

Before configuring Insights Forwarding, review the Considerations for Insights Forwarding of Metrics and Logs.

For Customer-Controlled Regions, forwarding metrics and logs to a third-party observability platform comes with additional resource requirements that you must provide for the messaging pods of your event broker services. For more information, see Insights Forwarding Enhanced Memory Limit Resource Requirements.

Forwarding your metrics and logs to an observability platform other than Insights requires you:

1. configure a forwarding destination using the Cloud Console.

2. upgrade the event broker service.

If you later decide to change your observability platform, or need to update the settings of your forwarding destination, you can edit the forwarding destination.

If you no longer need to forward you metrics and logs, you can delete the forwarding destination.

Considerations for Insights Forwarding of Metrics and Logs

Be aware of the following considerations when configuring and using Insights Forwarding:

• You must have an Insights subscription to use Insights Forwarding. To get Insights contact Solace.

• You must have access to the Cloud Console with the Administrator role to configure Insights Forwarding.

• Insights Forwarding requires Insights Agent version 0.9.74 and later.

• Insights Forwarding requires one of the following event broker service version:

  • 10.8.1.367-31 or later

  • 10.10.1.261-13 or later

  • 10.11.1.279-12 or later

  • LTS 10.25.0.148-27 or later

  • RTS 10.25.12.3666-28 or later

• Enabling Insights Forwarding affects all event broker services in your organization.

• Enabling Insights Forwarding disablesInsights notifications from Solace. Configuring notifications from third-party platforms is your responsibility.

• You are responsible for ensuring that the observability platform you send your metrics and logs to meets any of your data residency requirements.

• Customer-Controlled Region customers must provide increased memory limits to the Insights Agent for the primary and backup messaging nodes (or single messaging node in a Standalone service). For more information, see Insights Forwarding Enhanced Memory Limit Resource Requirements.

• You must have an API key or token generated by your observability platform and enter the API token or key into the Cloud Console when generating a forwarding destination.

• You must upgrade your event broker service after enabling Insights Forwarding before metric and log forwarding takes effect.

• Solace currently supports forwarding metrics and logs to Dynatrace, Splunk, and OTLP compatible destinations.

• Metric and log exporting occurs in near real-time. Solace does not support bulk exports of historical metrics and logs.

• Solace provides the Insights metrics and logs as is. It is your responsibility to configure your observability platform to use the data.

Insights Forwarding Enhanced Memory Limit Resource Requirements

For Customer-Controlled Regions, when you enable Insights Forwarding, you must provide the primary and backup messaging pods for your event broker services with additional resources to meet the enhanced needs of the Insights Agent. The monitoring pod is unaffected by this increase in resource requirements.

The following tables list the additional memory limit requirements for each messaging pod in an event broker service with Insights Forwarding enabled:

Additional Memory Limits for High Availability Event Broker Services

Event Broker Service Class	Pod Type (HA Role)	Additional Required Memory Limit Per Pod (MiB)	New Memory Limit Per Pod (MiB)	New Total Memory Limit Per Service(MiB)
Enterprise 250	Primary	256	7,983	18,526
	Backup	256	7,983
	Monitoring	0	2,560.0
Enterprise 1K	Primary	512	8,110	18,780
	Backup	512	8,110
	Monitoring	0	2,560.0
Enterprise 5K	Primary	1,024	25,241	53,042
	Backup	1,024	25,241
	Monitoring	0	2,560.0
Enterprise 10K	Primary	1,536	26,777	56,114
	Backup	1,536	26,777
	Monitoring	0	2,560.0
Enterprise 50K	Primary	2,560	46,291	95,142
	Backup	2,560	46,291
	Monitoring	0	2,560.0
Enterprise 100K	Primary	3,584	47,315	97,190
	Backup	3,584	47,315
	Monitoring	0	2,560.0

Additional Memory Limit Requirement for Enterprise-100 Standalone and Standalone Event Broker Services

Event Broker Service Class	Additional Required Memory Limit	Total Memory Limit Requirement
Enterprise-100 Standalone	0	7,727
Enterprise 250 Standalone	256	7,983
Enterprise 1K Standalone	512	8,110
Enterprise 5K Standalone	1024	25,241
Enterprise 10K Standalone	1536	26,777
Enterprise 50K Standalone	2,560	46,291
Enterprise 100K Standalone	3,584	47,315

Configuring Insights Forwarding

The first step in forwarding your event broker service logs and metrics is creating a forwarding destination using the Cloud Console. The forwarding destination provides the information required for sending metrics and logs to the observability platform of your choice. When creating a tracing destination, you have several destination options, including:

• Dynatrace
• Splunk
• OTLP/gRPC endpoint
• OTLP/HTTP endpoint

After creating a forwarding destination, you must upgrade your event broker service for the forwarding changes to take effect.

To configure a forwarding destination, perform the following steps:

1. Log in to the Solace Cloud Console if you have not done so yet. The URL to access the Cloud Console differs based on your authentication scheme. For more information, see Logging In to the Solace Cloud Console.
2. Click User & Account , select Account Details, and then click Insights Settings.
3. On the Forwarding Metrics and Logs tile, click Enable Forwarding Destination.

4. On the Add Forwarding Destination dialog, use the Type field to select the observability platform and configure the fields in the Metrics Observability section of the form with the required information. Note that the fields change depending on the destination type you select.

   Observability Destination Type	Configuration Fields
   Dynatrace	Connection Type—Select your connection type from the drop-down menu. You can choose secure (encrypted data using TLS/SSL) or insecure (skips certificate authority validation, using HTTP). Endpoint—Enter the Dynatrace OTLP API endpoint information where Insights should send the metrics and logs. You can get the connection information for the fields from the Dynatrace documentation. API Token—Enter the API token you generated in Dynatrace. You can get the connection and API token information from the Dynatrace documentation.
   Splunk HEC	Connection Type—Select your connection type from the drop-down menu. You can choose secure (encrypted data using TLS/SSL) or insecure (skips certificate authority validation, using HTTP). Endpoint—Enter the Splunk endpoint information where Insights should send the metrics and logs. Token—Enter the API token you generated in Splunk. You can get the connection and token information from the Splunk documentation.
   OTLP/gRPC endpoint	Connection Type—Select your connection type from the drop-down menu. You can choose secure (skips certificate authority validation) or insecure. Note: If your endpoint uses HTTPS and a self-signed certificate, you must choose Secure (skips certificate authority validation) for the connection type. Endpoint—Enter the host:port information for where the exporter will send the trace information using the protocol (HTTP or gRPC) supported by the observability backend. Refer to the documentation for your chosen observability backend for endpoint information and protocol support. Header—Enter the credentials required by your observability backend to send them your metrics or logs.
   OTLP/HTTP endpoint

5. In the Logs Observability section, either:

   • Leave Use some configuration as metrics selected to use the configuration you just completed for forwarding your logs.

   • Disable Use some configuration as metrics and complete the fields in the Logs Observability section to forward your logs with a different configuration. Use the table in step four as a guide for completing the fields.

6. Click Add Destination.

7. Upgrade your event broker services.

Upgrading Your Event Broker Service

After configuring your forwarding destination, you must upgrade your event broker service before the forwarding changes can take effect. Solace releases rolling upgrades for event broker services every two weeks. For more information, see: Upgrading Event Broker Services in Solace Cloud.

Editing Insights Forwarding Destination

You can edit your forwarding destination as required, and may need to do so if you decide to change observation platforms. To edit your forwarding destination, perform the following steps:

1. Log in to the Solace Cloud Console if you have not done so yet. The URL to access the Cloud Console differs based on your authentication scheme. For more information, see Logging In to the Solace Cloud Console.
2. Click User & Account , select Account Details and then click Insights Settings.
3. On the Forwarding Metrics and Logs tile, click Actions and select Edit.
4. On the Edit Forwarding Destination dialog, update the fields as required, using the table in step four of configuring a forwarding destination as a guide to the fields.
5. Click Update Destination.

Deleting an Insights Forwarding Destination

Deleting a forwarding destination does not end your Insights subscription. To end your Insights subscription, contact Solace.

You can delete your forwarding destination at any time. To delete a forwarding destination, perform the following steps:

1. Log in to the Solace Cloud Console if you have not done so yet. The URL to access the Cloud Console differs based on your authentication scheme. For more information, see Logging In to the Solace Cloud Console.
2. Click User & Account , select Account Details and then click Insights Settings.
3. On the Forwarding Metrics and Logs tile, click Actions and select Delete.

The additional memory limit Kubernetes resources used by the Insights Forwarding feature are freed up after you upgrade your event broker service.

Forwarding Solace Insights Metrics and Logs to Your Own Datadog Account

If you have a Solace Insights subscription, and your own Datadog account, Solace can forward the metrics and logs we collect while monitoring the health of the event broker services to your Datadog account. This feature is offered as controlled availability.

Forwarding Insights metrics and logs to your own Datadog account provides the benefit of centralizing all your collected data in one account. Having your data in one central account allows your application teams to make sense of it using tools in an environment they are already familiar with.

Beyond requiring your own Datadog Account and an Insights subscription, you must provide Solace with:

• an API key for the target Datadog account or sub-organization you want the data sent to.

• the URL for the Datadog account, or sub-organization.

• the target user must have a Standard role in the Datadog account (that is a role with the ability to push data).