The OpenTelemetry collector is a component you can implement to receive and process your telemetry data before exporting it to New Relic or another observability back-end. Instead of sending data from your apps directly to New Relic, you can first route it to a central collector. This shifts the overhead of managing telemetry away from your apps and moves it into a single component.
Here's an example of the collector as a gateway, but you can also set up the collector as an agent that runs with your application or runs on the same host.
When to use a collector?
In many cases, the collector is an optional component, but you may need it for a variety of reasons:
- Gather metrics about your infrastructure, for example, capturing CPU usage on the servers hosting your apps.
- Ingest signals in a variety of formats (Jaeger, Prometheus, Fluent Bit, etc.).
- Send data to multiple observability back-ends.
- Transform metrics or change the names of spans before exporting them to an observability back-end.
- Offload the work of sending data over the network when you're running resource-intensive services.
- Enrich telemetry (metrics, traces and logs) with additional metadata.
Learn about how the collector works
To get an overview of the processes inside the collector, as well as deployment options, see the following OpenTelemetry docs:
How to set up the collector
The collector is part of the export step in the larger process of setting up OpenTelemetry with New Relic. As you complete the instructions you will see links to collector examples.