Supercharged GitHub Actions monitoring with OpenTelemetry at Elastic

Ready to observe your GitHub Actions from a central repository? At Elastic, we developed a custom OpenTelemetry Collector receiver to gather GitHub Actions logs and combine them with traces, allowing us to monitor all workflows in our GitHub organization. Learn about the challenges we faced, the solutions we implemented, and how centralized logs, traces, and metrics enhance CICD analysis and visualization. Initially focused on detecting security vulnerabilities, we discovered broader benefits of centralized logs combined with traces and metrics. We’ll share real-world examples, discuss handling log volume spikes, navigating GitHub Actions API rate limits, and ensuring data integrity during log collection. Additionally, we’ll cover fine-tuning the receiver for log volume efficiency and optimizing the collector’s reliability. Finally, we’ll showcase how centralized data has empowered our analysis and visualization capabilities, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.