The purpose and use-cases of the new component

We'd like to propose a new Provider component to address the security concerns raised by our OTel users regarding the presence of plaintext secrets in OTel Collector configuration files. There's a clear need for a secure method to manage and reference sensitive information within these configurations.

To address this, we propose this new Provider component that enables OTel Collectors to dynamically fetch secrets from Google Secret Manager during the Collector initialization. Google Secret Manager is a robust and secure service specifically designed for storing, managing, and accessing sensitive data.

Example configuration for the component

receivers:
  otlp:
    protocols:
      grpc:
      http:

processors:
  batch:
  memory_limiter:

exporters:
  otlp/provider1:
    endpoint: https://provider1.domain.com:12345
    headers:
      api-key: ${googlesecretsprovider:projects/<projectId>/secrets/<secretId>/versions/<versionId>}
    compression: gzip

service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers: [otlp]
      processors: [memory_limiter, batch]
      exporters: [otlp/provider1]
    metrics:
      receivers: [otlp]
      processors: [memory_limiter, batch]
      exporters: [otlp/provider1]

Telemetry data types supported

N/A

Code Owner(s)

@XuechunHou

Sponsor (optional)

@braydonk

Additional context

AWS's secret manager provider component: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/tree/main/confmap/provider/secretsmanagerprovider is similar to our proposal