OpenTelemetry Collector

The OpenTelemetry Collector is the great equalizer of observability — a vendor-neutral pipeline that collects logs, metrics, and traces from your apps and routes them anywhere. Prometheus, Jaeger, Datadog, Grafana Cloud — send the same telemetry to multiple backends simultaneously. Swap vendors by changing a config file, not your code.

If you're tired of vendor lock-in from Datadog or New Relic, the OTel Collector is your escape hatch. Deploy it as a sidecar or gateway, and your instrumentation stays portable forever. Datadog's agent is simpler but sends data to Datadog only. Prometheus handles metrics with a pull model. Vector is the faster alternative for log-specific pipelines.

The catch: OTel Collector is a pipeline, not a backend. You still need somewhere to send data — and running Jaeger plus Prometheus plus Loki is real infrastructure. The configuration is YAML-heavy with receivers, processors, and exporters that can get complex fast. And "vendor neutral" means no vendor's support team helps you debug your Collector config.