Glossary · Observability
What Is the OpenTelemetry Collector?
Written by
Amber Jain
Published
May 2026
Reading time
5 min read
The Collector is the OpenTelemetry workhorse: it takes telemetry in, transforms it, and sends it wherever you choose.
The OpenTelemetry Collector is a vendor-neutral service that receives, processes and exports telemetry through a configurable pipeline of receivers, processors and exporters, so instrumentation is decoupled from any specific backend.
Receivers, processors, exporters
A Collector pipeline has three stages. Receivers ingest telemetry (over OTLP, by scraping Prometheus, by reading host or Kubernetes metrics). Processors transform it (batching, filtering, adding metadata, sampling). Exporters send it onward over OTLP or another format. You compose these into pipelines per signal.
Agent and gateway roles
The Collector runs in two common roles. As an agent it sits close to the workload (on each host or node) to collect local telemetry. As a gateway it runs centrally to aggregate, process and route data from many agents. Splitting the two keeps collection local and policy central.
How it fits Opstral
Opstral receives telemetry from OpenTelemetry Collectors over OTLP, so customers keep their existing collection topology and simply route governed signal to Telemetry Ops and Sentinel AI.
Frequently asked questions
Is the OpenTelemetry Collector required?
No, SDKs can export directly to a backend, but the Collector is recommended because it decouples instrumentation from backends and centralises processing like batching and sampling.
What is the difference between agent and gateway Collectors?
An agent runs close to the workload to collect local telemetry; a gateway runs centrally to aggregate and route data from many agents.