OpenTelemetry Collector is a vendor-agnostic telemetry pipeline that receives, processes, and exports traces, metrics and logs. It is used as a standalone gateway or as an agent to centralize telemetry collection and forward data to backends such as Prometheus, Tempo, Jaeger, or commercial APMs.
The OpenTelemetry Collector (otelcol) is a vendor-agnostic telemetry pipeline that receives, processes, and exports traces, metrics, and logs. It is commonly deployed as a standalone gateway or an agent alongside applications to centralize telemetry collection, apply processing (sampling, batching), and forward data to backends such as Prometheus, Tempo, Jaeger, or commercial APMs. Official documentation: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/collector/installation/