Third-party distributions

OpenTelemetry distributions are a way of customizing OpenTelemetry components so that they’re easier to deploy and use with specific observability backends.

Any third-party can customize OpenTelemetry components with backend, vendor, or end-user specific changes. You can use OpenTelemetry components without a distribution, but a distribution might make things easier in some cases, like when a vendor has specific requirements.

The following list contains a sample of non-collector OpenTelemetry distributions and the component they customize. For OpenTelemetry Collector distributions, see Collector distributions.