We are trying to switch from the new relic java agent to the opentelemetry java agent.

It mostly works, but some things are missing including attributes. We dont know if this is an issue with the OT agent not sending it or NR not saving it.

Is there any way to debug the payloads going from the opentelmetry java agent to NR?

We could consider wireshark, but there are presumably easier options.

We have OT java agent configured with env vars, e.g.:

OTEL_ATTRIBUTE_VALUE_LENGTH_LIMIT=4095;
OTEL_EXPERIMENTAL_EXPORTER_OTLP_RETRY_ENABLED=true;
OTEL_EXPERIMENTAL_RESOURCE_DISABLED_KEYS=process.command_args;
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_COMPRESSION=gzip;
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=https://otlp.eu01.nr-data.net;
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS=api-key=xxxL;
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_METRICS_DEFAULT_HISTOGRAM_AGGREGATION=BASE2_EXPONENTIAL_BUCKET_HISTOGRAM;
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_METRICS_TEMPORALITY_PREFERENCE=delta;
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL=http/protobuf;
OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=myservice;
OTEL_INSTRUMENTATION_HTTP_CAPTURE_HEADERS_SERVER_REQUEST=X-CorrelationToken

https://opentelemetry.io/docs/collector/troubleshooting/ mentions “local exporters” but its not clear how we can enable or use these via the env vars. We have tried moving the env vars for new relic into config files, but have not manage to get that to work, and we dont know if these files can be overridden with env vars in production.

We tried this env var:

OTEL_JAVAAGENT_LOGGING=application

But this doesnt output anything when we hit a REST endpoint in our monitored service.