Opentelemetry Collector

Vendor-agnostic telemetry pipeline for traces, metrics, and logs. Receives telemetry from SDKs via OTLP (gRPC/HTTP), Jaeger, Zipkin, Prometheus scrape, and system sources (hostmetrics, filelog). Processes with batching, memory limiting, filtering, OTTL transforms, and tail-based sampling. Exports to any observability backend (Jaeger, Prometheus, Loki, Datadog, Grafana Cloud, etc.). Confidence is docs-derived.

YAML configuration: receivers (otlp, jaeger, prometheus, hostmetrics, filelog), processors (batch, memory_limiter, filter, transform, probabilistic_sampler, tail_sampling), exporters (otlp, otlphttp, jaeger, prometheus, loki, and 100+ contrib exporters); pipelines connect receivers → processors → exporters; otelcol CLI with --config flag; Health Check and Z-Pages extensions for observability of the collector itself.

No auth built into the core collector — auth delegated to extensions: basicauth, bearertokenauth, oauth2client; TLS mutual auth for OTLP gRPC/HTTP receivers and exporters; credentials for exporters injected via environment variable expansion in config (${env:API_KEY}); confmap providers support loading config from files, env vars, HTTP, or etcd — avoids hardcoding secrets; OpenTelemetry Operator for Kubernetes manages collector lifecycle and credential injection.

memory_limiter processor prevents OOM by shedding load when heap exceeds threshold; batch processor accumulates spans/metrics/logs and sends in configurable batches to reduce network overhead; retry exporter wraps any exporter with configurable retry and queue backpressure; queue_size and timeout configurable per exporter; OTTL (OpenTelemetry Transformation Language) for in-flight attribute modification without SDK changes; health_check extension exposes HTTP endpoint for liveness probes.

Documentation covers quickstart (Docker/binary), YAML configuration reference, receivers/processors/exporters component catalog, OTTL language guide, Kubernetes deployment via Operator, and contrib distribution component list. OpenTelemetry Collector Contrib extends core with 100+ community components. De facto standard telemetry pipeline in the cloud-native ecosystem. Confidence is docs-derived.