OpenTelemetry OpenTelemetry Collector Use Cases Pattern 1 - Fan out

Pattern 1 - Fan out

One common use case for the collector is to centralize the telemetry data for a given setup, so that platform engineers and SRE’s can decide where to send them. It’s not unusual to use this setup to send the same telemetry data to multiple backends at once, so that different tools can be compared. We have also seen this setup being used to store a local copy of the telemetry data, so that you can retain the data ownership, while still able to use a cloud observability solution.

Example configuration:

yaml

extensions:
  basicauth/traces:
    client_auth:
      username: "${TRACES_USER_ID}"
      password: "${TOKEN}"

receivers:
  otlp:
    protocols:
      grpc:

processors:
  batch:

exporters:
  file:
  otlp/tempo:
    endpoint: tempo-us-central1.grafana.net:443
    auth:
      authenticator: basicauth/traces

service:
  extensions: [basicauth/traces]
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers: [otlp]
      processors: [batch]
      exporters: [file, otlp/tempo]