OpenTelemetry Collector

The OpenTelemetry Collector is the deployable component of OpenTelemetry, the CNCF-graduated standard for application telemetry. It receives traces, metrics, and logs from instrumented applications over open protocols like OTLP, can batch, filter, and transform that data in flight, and exports it to one or more backends - so a team can switch or add observability backends by changing collector configuration rather than re-instrumenting every service.

It runs as an agent alongside an application or as a standalone gateway collecting from many services at once, and ships with a large ecosystem of receivers and exporters for popular tools, including Jaeger and Prometheus-compatible systems already in this catalog.

The Collector is a fit for teams that want to instrument once with an open, vendor-neutral standard and decide - or change - where that telemetry data ends up later, rather than instrumenting directly against one proprietary agent.