DevOps Glossary

OpenTelemetry Collector is an open source service that receives, processes, and exports telemetry data such as traces, metrics, and logs. It acts as a vendor-neutral pipeline between your applications, infrastructure, and observability backends, so you can collect data once and send it to tools such as Prometheus, Jaeger, Grafana, Datadog, Honeycomb, or cloud monitoring services. As part of OpenTelemetry, the Collector can run as an agent beside workloads or as a gateway for many services, using receivers to ingest data, processors to batch or filter it, and exporters to forward it to the right destination.