The OpenTelemetry Collector is a standalone process designed to receive, process and export telemetry data. It removes the need to run, operate and maintain multiple agents/collectors in order to support open-source telemetry data formats (e.g. Jaeger, Prometheus, Zipkin, etc.) sending to multiple open-source or commercial back-ends.
The Collector has two different deployment strategies: either running as an agent alongside a service, or as a remote application. In general, using both is recommended: the agent would be deployed with your service and run as a sidecar; meanwhile, the remote app would be deployed separately, as its own application running in a container or virtual machine.
Here’s a diagram showing the collector architecture:
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If you want to configure it, you need to know that the configuration contains three main components:
- RECEIVERS: They can be push or pull based and is how data gets into the Collector.
- EXPORTERS: They can be push or pull based and is how you send data to one or more backends/destinations.
- PROCESSORS: They run on the data between being received and being exported. Processors are optional.