OpenTelemetry - Painlessly Ship Docker Container Logs to OpenObserve

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:52:36 +0100

Using the contrib release of the OpenTelemetry Collector (GitHub) container, you can ship the standard JSON Lines logs generated by the Docker engine to OpenObserve using a container in the self-same stack. This approach is not ideal for a serious production or enterprise deployment but will be sufficient if you have a simple self-hosting use case like mine.

The Docker engine writes the stdout and stderr logs from containers (i.e. the output of docker logs <container_id/container_name>) to /var/lib/docker/containers. This directory will contain a directory per container, named for the 64-char hexadecimal container ID, and a log file in each subdirectory named <container_id>-json.log. OTEL Collector contrib is needed to get access to the filelog receiver with support for the docker format.

Otel on Aidan Mitchell

OpenTelemetry - Painlessly Ship Docker Container Logs to OpenObserve