OpenTelemetry Collector
Vendor-neutral telemetry collector for receiving, processing, and exporting traces, metrics, and logs.
| License | Apache-2.0 |
| Repository | https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector |
| GitHub stars (approx) | 7200 |
| Language | Go |
| Self-host deployment | single binary, docker, kubernetes operator |
| Commercial hosted option | no / self-host only |
| Freshness status | Fresh |
| Freshness checked | 2026-06-23 |
| Categories | traces, metrics, logs |
OpenTelemetry Collector is the neutral pipeline layer for OpenTelemetry-era observability. It receives traces, metrics, and logs, processes or batches them, then exports to open-source or commercial backends.
Pick it if: you need one agent or gateway for OTLP, Prometheus, Jaeger, Zipkin, and vendor exporters without wiring every app directly to a backend.
Skip it if: you want storage, querying, dashboards, or alerting in the same product. The Collector moves telemetry; it does not analyze it.
Deployment: single binary, container image, or Kubernetes Operator-managed collector. Most production setups run it as node agents plus shared gateway collectors.