Transporting telemetry via OTLP
We've mentioned OTLP multiple times in this chapter and this book, so let's look at what it is. To ensure that telemetry data is transmitted as efficiently and reliably as possible, OpenTelemetry has defined OTLP. The protocol itself is defined via protocol buffer (https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers) definition files. This means that any client or server that's interested in sending or receiving OTLP only has to implement these definitions to support it. OTLP is the recommended protocol of OpenTelemetry for transmitting telemetry data and is supported as a core component of the collector.
Important Note
Protocol buffers or protobufs are a language and platform-agnostic mechanism for serializing data that was originally intended for gRPC. Libraries are provided to generate the code from the protobuf definition files in a variety of languages. This is a much deeper topic than we will have time for in this book, so if you...
