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on 08-31-2023 08:30 AM
The OpenTelemetry Collector is a central component for cloud-native telemetry collection and processing. It's primarily deployed in two models: as an agent—capturing metrics, traces, and logs directly from your services and resources; or as a gateway—pooling and transforming telemetry data from a multitude of sources.
We recommend testing your configuration by deploying the Collector on your workstation. This not only provides a controlled environment for testing, but also ensures that your data is ready for ingestion into Cloud Observability.
What is the OpenTelemetry Collector?
The OpenTelemetry Collector sits in your telemetry pipeline the appliance responsible for receiving, processing, and exporting telemetry data. It boasts an expansive ecosystem of core and community components, paving the way for comprehensive observability pipelines that can be tailored to your organization's needs. Learn more about its architecture and capabilities on our docs site.
Deploying on your workstation: A quick start guide
There's a quick way to deploy an OpenTelemetry Collector alongside the OpenTelemetry Community Demo app, a collection of example microservices written in various languages that have been instrumented using OpenTelemetry agents and SDKs. Detailed steps can be found in our Quick Start guide.
Deploying the OpenTelemetry Collector on your workstation serves as a foundation, preparing you for larger-scale implementations and ensuring data integrity and clarity in Cloud Observability.
Deployments Models for Production Telemetry
- Collectors for application trace data
- If you want to understand how the Collector can be used to ingest and process trace data from applications, navigate through our collector walkthrough for application data.
- If you want to understand how the Collector can be used to ingest and process trace data from applications, navigate through our collector walkthrough for application data.
- Infrastructure metrics: Diving deeper, the Collector can also directly ingest infrastructure metrics, as detailed in our dedicated walkthrough.
- Kubernetes-specific deployment: For those operating in Kubernetes ecosystems, the Collector's deployment can be optimized for metric, log, and trace extraction from K8s clusters and workloads. Our comprehensive guide walks you through the process of deployment using the Kubernetes OpenTelemetry Operator.
