OpenTelemetry Collector
A vendor-agnostic proxy that receives, processes, and exports telemetry data to one or more backends.
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The OpenTelemetry Collector is a standalone service that sits between instrumented applications and whichever observability backends a team uses. It receives telemetry (via OTLP or many other supported protocols), can process it — batching, filtering, sampling, redacting sensitive fields, adding metadata — and exports it to one or more destinations simultaneously.
Running a Collector (rather than having every application export directly to a backend) is the standard pattern for OpenTelemetry deployments: it centralizes configuration, makes it easy to fan out the same data to multiple backends, and lets you change backends without touching application code.
Visit the official documentation for deployment patterns (agent, gateway, and combined modes) and the full list of supported receivers and exporters.