OpenTelemetry OpenTelemetry Collector

OpenTelemetry Collector

The OpenTelemetry Collector is a middleware that can run either very close to your workloads (“agent” mode), or on a central location (“collector”, or “service” mode). It is built following a pipeline principle, with receivers, processors, and exporters, potentially making use of extensions:

• receivers are the components that are responsible for gathering or receiving telemetry data
• processors are able to look into the telemetry data and take decisions based on them, such as perform data cleanup, apply sampling decisions, include or remove attributes, enrich data based on where it’s running, among others
• exporters will then send the data out of the process, likely to one or more telemetry backends or another layer of collectors
• extensions are not part of the data pipeline but can help other components like the authentication extensions, or the collector as a whole, like the debugging interfaces

Documentation pages:

• Connect OpenTelemetry Collector to Grafana Cloud databases
• OpenTelemetry Collector Use Cases
• Send logs to Grafana Loki using the OpenTelemetry Collector
• How to scale your collection pipeline with the OpenTelemetry Collector
• Troubleshooting the OpenTelemetry Collector
• Enriching resource attributes