OTel Collectors and Exporters

The OpenTelemetry Collector is a powerful, vendor-agnostic proxy that receives, processes, and exports observability data. Think of it as a central traffic controller for your logs, metrics, and traces.

It simplifies managing your observability data, especially in complex distributed systems, by acting as an intermediary.

Instead of sending observability data directly from every application to different backend systems, the Collector acts as an intermediary. This offers several benefits:

• Reduced Overhead: Applications send data once to the Collector.
• Centralized Processing: Apply common transformations in one place.
• Backend Flexibility: Easily switch or add observability backends without changing application code.