Splunk Observability Cloud OTel Collector Ports and Endpoints to troubleshoot port conflicts

Applicability

Splunk OTel Collector, Splunk Observability Cloud, Port conflict

Description

When installing the Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector, the process may fail if a port required by the collector is already in use by another application on the server. This issue is typically identified during installation or while starting the collector service, where error messages indicate a port conflict.

 

By default, the Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector exposes several endpoints. Endpoints will either be exposed:
- Locally (localhost): Within the service
- Publicly (0.0.0.0): On all network interfaces

The endpoints exposed depends on which mode the Splunk OpenTelemetry Collector is configured in.
- http(s)://0.0.0.0:13133/ Health endpoint useful for load balancer monitoring
- http(s)://0.0.0.0:[6831|6832|14250|14268]/api/traces Jaeger [gRPC|Thrift HTTP] receiver
- http(s)://localhost:55554/debug/configz/[initial|effective] in-memory configuration
- http(s)://localhost:55679/debug/[tracez|pipelinez] zPages monitoring
- http(s)://0.0.0.0:4317 OpenTelemetry gRPC receiver
- http(s)://0.0.0.0:6060 HTTP Forwarder used to receive Smart Agent apiUrl data
- http(s)://localhost:8888/metrics Prometheus metrics for the Collector
- http(s)://localhost:8006 Fluent forward receiver
- http(s)://0.0.0.0:9080 SignalFx forwarder receiver
- http(s)://0.0.0.0:9411/api/[v1|v2]/spans Zipkin JSON (can be set to proto) receiver
- http(s)://0.0.0.0:9943/v2/trace SignalFx APM receiver

Components, especially receivers, can and should be disabled if not required for an environment.

 

Common symptoms:

 

• Installation failure or service does not start
• Logs showing address/port already in use
• Example error: "listen tcp :<PORT>: bind: address already in use"

Investigation

If there is a port conflict, a user can view all open ports on Linux using the following:

1) Install the net-tools application


sudo apt install net-tools

 

2) Show all open ports 


sudo netstat -tunlp

 

3) Alternatively, see all actively listening ports

sudo lsof -i -P -n | grep LISTEN

Resolution

A user can change the ports in the Splunk OTel Collector manually.

Sample Splunk OTel Collector agent configuration is
available here.

Splunk OTEL Collector chart (for Kubernetes) is available here. Please see section The ports to be exposed by the agent to the host.

Additionally, if you wish to disable a specific type of metric in order to alleviate the port conflict, you can do so by adding the following to your OTeL Configuration File:

service:
  telemetry:
    metrics:
      level: none

Restart the Splunk OTel Collector for the configuration to take effect. Update firewall rules and all clients communicating with the Splunk OTel Collector.

Related Links

https://github.com/signalfx/splunk-otel-collector/blob/main/docs/security.md#exposed-endpoints
https://github.com/signalfx/splunk-otel-collector/blob/main/cmd/otelcol/config/collector/agent_config.yaml
https://github.com/signalfx/splunk-otel-collector-chart/blob/main/helm-charts/splunk-otel-collector/values.yaml

Revision History

Revision	Publish Date	Comments
1.0	30-Sep-2026	Initial Release