Collector

The OpenTelemetry Collector offers a vendor-agnostic implementation on how 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 observability data formats (e.g. Jaeger, Prometheus, etc.) sending to one or more open-source or commercial back-ends. The Collector is the default location instrumentation libraries export telemetry data.

Objectives:

• Usable: Reasonable default configuration, supports popular protocols, runs and collects out of the box.
• Performant: Highly stable and performant under varying loads and configurations.
• Observable: An exemplar of an observable service.
• Extensible: Customizable without touching the core code.
• Unified: Single codebase, deployable as an agent or collector with support for traces, metrics, and logs (future).