A Telemetry Pipeline
The OpenTelemetry Collector is a standalone process that sits between your apps and your backends. Instead of every service knowing how to talk to your vendor, they send to the collector, which handles the rest.
Three Stages
- Receivers accept data in many formats, such as OTLP or older protocols.
- Processors transform it: batching, filtering, redacting attributes, or tail sampling.
- Exporters send the result to one or more backends.
These are chained into pipelines, one per signal type like traces, metrics, and logs.
Why It Helps
- Decoupling: switch backends by changing collector config, not app code.
- Offload: heavy work like tail sampling moves out of the application.
- Fan out: send the same data to several destinations at once.
A common pattern is an agent collector on each host feeding a gateway collector pool that does the expensive processing centrally.
Key idea
The OpenTelemetry Collector receives, processes, and exports telemetry through configurable pipelines, decoupling apps from backends and offloading heavy work.