OpenTelemetry Collector Anti-Patterns

The OpenTelemetry Collector is one of my favorite OpenTelemetry (OTel) components. It’s a flexible and powerful data pipeline which allows you to ingest OTel data from one or more sources, transform it (including batching, filtering, and masking), and export it to one or more observability backends for analysis. It’s vendor-neutral. It’s extensible, meaning that you can create your own custom components for it. What’s there not to like?

Unfortunately, as it happens with many tools out there, it is also …

analysis batching components data data pipeline export filtering masking meaning observability opensource opentelemetry patterns pipeline vendor