Quick start
Setup and collect telemetry in minutes!
The OpenTelemetry Collector offers a vendor-agnostic implementation of how to receive, process and export telemetry data. It removes the need to run, operate, and maintain multiple agents/collectors. This works with improved scalability and supports open source observability data formats (e.g. Jaeger, Prometheus, Fluent Bit, etc.) sending to one or more open source or commercial backends. The local Collector agent is the default location to which instrumentation libraries export their telemetry data.
For most language specific instrumentation libraries you have exporters for popular backends and OTLP. You might wonder,
under what circumstances does one use a collector to send data, as opposed to having each service send directly to the backend?
For trying out and getting started with OpenTelemetry, sending your data directly to a backend is a great way to get value quickly. Also, in a development or small-scale environment you can get decent results without a collector.
However, in general we recommend using a collector alongside your service, since it allows your service to offload data quickly and the collector can take care of additional handling like retries, batching, encryption or even sensitive data filtering.
It is also easier to setup a collector than you might think: the default OTLP exporters in each language assume a local collector endpoint, so if you launch a collector it will automatically start receiving telemetry.
The Collector status is: mixed, since core Collector components currently have mixed stability levels.
Collector components differ in their maturity levels. Each component has its
stability documented in its README.md
. You can find a list of all available
Collector components in the registry.
Support is guaranteed for Collector software artifacts for a certain time period based on the artifact’s intended audience. This support includes, at minimum, fixes for critical bugs and security issues. See the support policies for more details.
For releases, including the latest release, see Releases.
Setup and collect telemetry in minutes!
Patterns you can apply to deploy the OpenTelemetry collector
Learn how to configure the Collector to suit your needs
How to manage your OpenTelemetry collector deployment at scale
Recommendations for troubleshooting the Collector
Instructions on how to build your own collector components
Exporters, processors, receivers and other useful components for the OpenTelemetry Collector
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