OpenTelemetry Collector
The OpenTelemetry Collector is a vendor-agnostic solution to gather telemetry data from your instrumented applications and export that data to different backend systems of record.
Honeycomb supports ingesting telemetry via the OTLP format, which makes the OpenTelemetry Collector an optional component in your stack.
How it works
The OpenTelemetry Collector gathers telemetry data from applications instrumented with OpenTelemetry SDKs. Additionally, it supports other telemetry formats such as traces instrumented with Jaeger, Zipkin, or OpenCensus and metrics instrumented with Prometheus, StatsD, or Influx. The OpenTelemetry Collector can help you transform various types of telemetry into a common format before exporting it to a data store like Honeycomb.
Honeycomb supports receiving telemetry data via OpenTelemetry’s native protocol, OTLP, over gRPC, HTTP/protobuf, and HTTP/JSON. That means you can send OpenTelemetry data to Honeycomb directly, without requiring an OpenTelemetry Collector. However, you may choose to use the collector for other reasons. If you need a collector, you can use its standard OTLP exporter to send data to Honeycomb without any additional exporters or plugins.
The OpenTelemetry Collector can receive various types of telemetry, process it, and then export it in various formats to multiple backends.