The Collector — Pipelines
Run a vendor-neutral pipeline to receive, process, and export telemetry.
The OpenTelemetry Collector is a standalone service that sits between your instrumented apps and your backends, decoupling them. It is built from three pluggable stages: receivers ingest data (OTLP, plus Prometheus, Jaeger, Zipkin, host metrics and more), processors transform it (batching, memory limiting, attribute editing, filtering, and tail-based sampling), and exporters send it onward to one or many backends. You assemble these into pipelines per signal in a single config file.
A mail distribution centre: it accepts parcels in any format (receivers), repackages, labels, and screens them (processors), then routes each to the right destination courier (exporters) — senders never deal with the destinations directly.