Collector
A middleware pipeline that receives, processes, and exports telemetry from many sources to many backends.
Definition
The OpenTelemetry Collector is a vendor-agnostic, configurable agent that receives telemetry data (traces, metrics, and logs) from applications and infrastructure, processes it through a pipeline, and exports it to one or more observability backends.
In depth
The Collector consists of three pipeline stages: receivers (which accept data in various formats — OTLP, Prometheus, Jaeger, Zipkin, etc.), processors (which transform, filter, or enrich data), and exporters (which ship data to backends). Running a Collector between your applications and your observability platform provides several benefits: it decouples instrumentation from backend choice, enables centralized sampling decisions (tail-based sampling), adds resource attributes, and reduces the number of open connections from your application pods. obseria.io is fully compatible with the OpenTelemetry Collector and provides a pre-configured distribution optimised for common cloud environments.
Related terms
See Collector in action
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