The purpose of OpenTelemetry Collector
In essence, OpenTelemetry Collector is a process that receives telemetry in various formats, processes it, and then exports it to one or more destinations. The collector acts as a broker between the source of the telemetry, applications, or nodes, for example, and the backend that will ultimately store the data for analysis. The following diagram shows where the collector would be deployed in an environment containing various components:
Figure 8.1 – Architecture diagram of an environment with a collector
Deploying a component such as OpenTelemetry Collector is not free as it requires additional resources to be spent on running, operating, and monitoring it. The following are some reasons why deploying a collector may be helpful:
- You can decouple the source of the telemetry data from its destination. This means that developers can configure a single destination for the telemetry data in application code...
