Observe · Telemetry standard
OpenTelemetry
OpenTelemetry standardises how applications emit telemetry. The Collector receives, processes and exports data to backends such as Prometheus, Loki, Tempo or commercial platforms without changing application code.
On this page
What it does
Provides language SDKs and auto-instrumentation, a wire protocol (OTLP) and the Collector — a pipeline of receivers, processors and exporters.
Where it fits
Observe stage: instrument once, export anywhere; the Collector also redacts sensitive attributes before data leaves the cluster.
Quick start
helm install otel-collector open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector -n observability --create-namespace --set mode=deployment
# Application: OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://otel-collector:4317 OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=payments-apiCommon pitfalls
- Shipping 100% of traces at scale is expensive; configure tail or probabilistic sampling in the Collector.
- Attributes can carry PII; add an
attributes/redactionprocessor.
On this site
- Kubernetes Observability with Prometheus, Grafana and Loki: the metrics and logs stack this collector would feed; traces are not covered there.