MuleSoft acts as the central nervous system for modern, composable architectures linking critical systems like ERPs, CRMs, custom applications, and customer-facing web and mobile applications.
As MuleSoft is central to our customers’ enterprise architecture, any issues in the MuleSoft layer can have multiple implications across applications. Given this foundational role, continuous monitoring of this critical system is essential. This drives the need for standards-based observability with the ability to securely and quickly push logs and traces directly from the Mule Runtime to the customer’s chosen observability backend.
Key aspects of the solution
We are excited to announce the GA of the Direct Telemetry Stream from the Mule Runtime. This capability allows you to stream high-fidelity telemetry in Open Telemetry format (OTeL) from the Mule Runtime to observability tools like Dynatrace, Datadog, Splunk, New Relic, Elastic, and more.
Direct telemetry stream configuration
The Mule runtime ships with a predefined configuration that allows you to configure exporting both Open telemetry based traces and logs. For CloudHub 1.0, CloudHub 2.0, Hybrid Deployments and Runtime Fabric Deployments, the solution is configured by setting protected application properties. Runtime Version Requirements for logs and traces is 4.11 Edge +.
The solution offers a rich set of configuration options including the telemetry endpoint, sampling rates for tracing, retry configurations, batch size settings etc. Review our documentation for the full list configuration and properties.
Correlating logs and traces
Enhanced observability is achieved by correlating logs and traces. This eliminates the guesswork in troubleshooting. For example, within your observability platform, you can instantly pivot from viewing a slow “span” in a trace visualization to viewing the logs generated during that specific interval. This accelerates root cause analysis and improves operational resilience. The Direct Telemetry Stream solution provides the capability to enable correlation between application traces and logs.
Secure transmission of telemetry
The Direct Telemetry Stream solution ensures that the telemetry data is exported directly from your runtime plane, never leaving your established trust boundary. This capability is vital for customers with stringent enterprise requirements concerning security and data residency. This approach is cost effective by eliminating the multi-hop network transmissions costs.
What our customers are saying
Diego Pettisani, Enterprise Architecture Manager at MSC Cruises says: “Direct Telemetry Export and OpenTelemetry are key enablers of MSC Cruises’ observability strategy. The ability to export MuleSoft telemetry securely and efficiently to our third-party platforms helps us accelerate insight, improve operational resilience, and scale enterprise monitoring with confidence. MuleSoft’s investment in OpenTelemetry gives us a future-ready foundation for alerts, actions, and AI-driven insights as our integration landscape continues to grow.”
The team at Unipol says: “By leveraging Direct Telemetry Export and OpenTelemetry, Unipol has optimized its observability stack. This setup enables secure, efficient data transfers from MuleSoft to third-party monitoring tools, enhancing our alerting and incident response capabilities. Now, log and trace data from MuleSoft correlates with that from the integrated systems, allowing Unipol to have end-to-end control over every transaction despite the many systems involved. The move to OpenTelemetry ensures our monitoring framework remains compatible with future AI and automation scaling requirements.”
The team at iA (Group Financier) says: “Having access to exporting telemetry data intuitively using OpenTelemetry gives us all the leverage we need to be compliant to our more restrictive security policies. It enables us to be in control of what has high value regarding monitoring and alerting, and helps us provide the right level of platform and application developments to our customers and partners.”
The recommended architecture you need
Mule runtime supports export of all its telemetry data using the OpenTelemetry (OTLP) protocol and binary/protobuf format. You can configure an endpoint for each signal type (traces and logs), and data will be sent there. However, we strongly recommend using an Open Telemetry collector. The collector provides the most flexible and feature-rich architecture for a wide range of use cases and deployment scenarios. To learn more, see OpenTelemetry Collector for more information.
