OpenTelemetry Collector Has a Free API: Vendor-Agnostic Telemetry Pipeline

The OpenTelemetry Collector is a vendor-agnostic proxy that receives, processes, and exports telemetry data (traces, metrics, logs). It eliminates vendor lock-in and provides a unified pipeline for all your observability data.

What Is the OTel Collector?

The OpenTelemetry Collector is a CNCF project component that acts as a central hub for telemetry data. It receives data from your applications, processes it (filtering, sampling, enriching), and exports it to any backend.

Key Features:

• Vendor-agnostic (50+ exporters)
• Traces, metrics, and logs in one pipeline
• Processing: filtering, sampling, batching
• Multiple receivers (OTLP, Jaeger, Prometheus, etc.)
• Tail-based sampling
• Resource detection
• Health check extension
• pprof and zpages debugging

Installation

# Docker
docker run -d -p 4317:4317 -p 4318:4318 \
  -v $(pwd)/otel-config.yaml:/etc/otelcol/config.yaml \
  otel/opentelemetry-collector-contrib:latest

# Kubernetes via Helm
helm repo add open-telemetry https://open-telemetry.github.io/opentelemetry-helm-charts
helm install otel-collector open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector

Collector Configuration

# otel-config.yaml
receivers:
  otlp:
    protocols:
      grpc:
        endpoint: 0.0.0.0:4317
      http:
        endpoint: 0.0.0.0:4318
  prometheus:
    config:
      scrape_configs:
        - job_name: 'my-app'
          scrape_interval: 15s
          static_configs:
            - targets: ['app:8080']

processors:
  batch:
    timeout: 5s
    send_batch_size: 1000
  filter:
    metrics:
      exclude:
        match_type: strict
        metric_names:
          - go_gc_duration_seconds
  attributes:
    actions:
      - key: environment
        value: production
        action: upsert

exporters:
  otlp:
    endpoint: jaeger:4317
    tls:
      insecure: true
  prometheus:
    endpoint: 0.0.0.0:8889
  logging:
    loglevel: info

service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers: [otlp]
      processors: [batch, attributes]
      exporters: [otlp, logging]
    metrics:
      receivers: [otlp, prometheus]
      processors: [batch, filter]
      exporters: [prometheus, logging]
    logs:
      receivers: [otlp]
      processors: [batch]
      exporters: [logging]

Send Data to Collector

from opentelemetry import trace, metrics
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace import TracerProvider
from opentelemetry.sdk.trace.export import BatchSpanProcessor
from opentelemetry.exporter.otlp.proto.grpc.trace_exporter import OTLPSpanExporter
from opentelemetry.sdk.metrics import MeterProvider
from opentelemetry.sdk.metrics.export import PeriodicExportingMetricReader
from opentelemetry.exporter.otlp.proto.grpc.metric_exporter import OTLPMetricExporter

# Setup tracing
trace.set_tracer_provider(TracerProvider())
tracer_provider = trace.get_tracer_provider()
tracer_provider.add_span_processor(
    BatchSpanProcessor(OTLPSpanExporter(endpoint="http://localhost:4317"))
)

# Setup metrics
metric_reader = PeriodicExportingMetricReader(
    OTLPMetricExporter(endpoint="http://localhost:4317"),
    export_interval_millis=5000
)
metrics.set_meter_provider(MeterProvider(metric_readers=[metric_reader]))

# Use
tracer = trace.get_tracer("my-service")
meter = metrics.get_meter("my-service")

request_counter = meter.create_counter("http.requests", description="HTTP request count")

with tracer.start_as_current_span("handle-request") as span:
    span.set_attribute("http.method", "GET")
    span.set_attribute("http.url", "/api/users")
    request_counter.add(1, {"method": "GET", "path": "/api/users"})

Collector Health API

# Health check
curl http://localhost:13133/

# zpages for debugging
curl http://localhost:55679/debug/tracez

# pprof profiling
curl http://localhost:1777/debug/pprof/

Resources

• OTel Collector Docs
• Collector GitHub — 4.5K+ stars
• Contrib Repo

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