Demystifying the OpenTelemetry Collector: The key fundamentals

The OpenTelemetry Collector is a crucial tool for utilizing OpenTelemetry to its full potential and getting the most out of application and system data. It's an executable file that can collect and modify telemetry, then send it to one or more backends, including New Relic, providing a highly configurable and extensible way to handle observability data within modern cloud-native environments. The Collector is modular, with customizable data pipelines for traces, logs, and metrics, allowing users to add components that enhance, filter, and batch their data. It can receive data in different formats from various sources and over different protocols, and export data in different supported formats, including New Relic's OpenTelemetry data natively. Users can define multiple exporters if needed, and use connectors to send data between pipelines. The Collector has multiple deployment options, including a single instance or as part of a gateway or agent deployment. It also has two official distributions: core and contrib, with the core distro being lightweight and efficient, and the contrib distro providing additional features but at varying levels of maturity. Users can monitor the Collector's health and performance using internal telemetry, including basic metrics exposed via Prometheus and logs emitted to stderr. To get started, users can use the New Relic fork of the OpenTelemetry demo app or join the Collector Special Interest Group on CNCF's Slack instance for additional support and resources.