Technical requirements

This chapter will introduce OpenTelemetry Collector as a standalone binary, which can be downloaded from https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-releases/releases/tag/v0.43.0. It's also possible to build the collector from the source, but this will not be covered in this chapter. The following commands will download the binary that's been compiled for macOS on Intel processors, extract the otelcol file, and ensure the binary can be executed:

$ wget -O otelcol.tar.gz https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-releases/releases/download/v0.43.0/otelcol_0.43.0_darwin_amd64.tar.gz
$ tar -xzf otelcol.tar.gz otelcol
$ chmod +x ./otelcol
$ ./otelcol --version
otelcol version 0.43.0

With the correct binary downloaded, let's ensure that the collector can start by using the following command. It is expected that the process will exit:

$ ./otelcol
Error: failed to get config: invalid configuration: no enabled receivers...