Red Hat build of OpenTelemetry is based on the open source OpenTelemetry project, which aims to provide unified, standardized, and vendor-neutral telemetry data collection for cloud-native software. Red Hat build of OpenTelemetry product provides support for deploying and managing the OpenTelemetry Collector and simplifying the workload instrumentation.
The OpenTelemetry Collector can receive, process, and forward telemetry data in multiple formats, making it the ideal component for telemetry processing and interoperability between telemetry systems. The Collector provides a unified solution for collecting and processing metrics, traces, and logs.
The OpenTelemetry Collector has a number of features including the following:
- Data Collection and Processing Hub
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It acts as a central component that gathers telemetry data like metrics and traces from various sources. This data can be created from instrumented applications and infrastructure.
- Customizable telemetry data pipeline
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The OpenTelemetry Collector is designed to be customizable. It supports various processors, exporters, and receivers.
- Auto-instrumentation features
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Automatic instrumentation simplifies the process of adding observability to applications. Developers don’t need to manually instrument their code for basic telemetry data.
Here are some of the use cases for the OpenTelemetry Collector:
- Centralized data collection
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In a microservices architecture, the Collector can be deployed to aggregate data from multiple services.
- Data enrichment and processing
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Before forwarding data to analysis tools, the Collector can enrich, filter, and process this data.
- Multi-backend receiving and exporting
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The Collector can receive and send data to multiple monitoring and analysis platforms simultaneously.