Chapter 8: OpenTelemetry Collector

So, now that we've learned how to use OpenTelemetry to generate traces, metrics, and logs, we want to do something with all this telemetry data. To make the most of this data, we will need to be able to store and visualize it because, let's be honest – reading telemetry data from the console isn't going to cut it. As we'll discuss in Chapter 10, Configuring Backends, many destinations can be used for telemetry data. To send telemetry to a backend, the telemetry pipeline for metrics, traces, and logs needs to be configured to use an exporter that's specific to that signal and the backend. For example, if you wanted to send traces to Zipkin, metrics to Prometheus, and logs to Elasticsearch, each would need to be configured in the appropriate application code. Configuring this across dozens of services written in different languages adds to the complexity of managing the code. But now, imagine deciding that one of the...