opentelemetry-collector-contrib

The OpenTelemetry Collector is the vendor-neutral pipeline for your telemetry data: metrics, logs, traces all flowing through one binary. This contrib repo adds the receivers, exporters, and processors that make it actually useful in production. Prometheus, Jaeger, Kafka, AWS CloudWatch, Datadog, and dozens more.

Setup ranges from "download a binary and point it at your backend" to "build a custom distro with exactly the components you need." The Collector Builder tool lets you compile a purpose-built binary with only what you use. No bloat, no unused code listening on ports.

Solo devs running a few services: plug this in front of Grafana Cloud's free tier and you have production-grade observability for zero dollars. Teams already paying for Datadog or New Relic: this is how you collect once and ship anywhere, or migrate vendors without re-instrumenting everything.

The catch: configuration is YAML and the docs assume you already know what a receiver and exporter are. The learning curve is real if you are new to observability pipelines.