System-level telemetry
As discussed in Chapter 8, OpenTelemetry Collector, the OpenTelemetry collector can be configured to collect metrics about the system it's running on. Often, this can be helpful when you wish to identify resource constraints on nodes, which is a fairly common problem. Additionally, the collector can be configured to forward data. So, it might be beneficial to deploy a collector on each host or node in your environment to provide an aggregation point for all the applications running on that node. As shown in the following diagram, deploying a collector as an agent can reduce the number of connections needed to send telemetry from each node:
Figure 9.2 – Backend connections from nodes with and without an agent
This can become a significant processing bottleneck if, for example, the backend requires secure connections to be established with some level of frequency and if many applications are running per node.
