Glossary
OpenTelemetry Collector
A standalone OpenTelemetry service that receives telemetry, runs it through pipelines of processors and exports it to one or more backends.
An app can export straight to a backend, or send everything to a Collector and let the Collector decide where it goes. A Collector is built from receivers, which bring data in, processors, which change or batch it, and exporters, which send it on. Pipelines in the service section wire them together per signal: a pipeline is a set of receivers, processors and exporters, the Collector needs at least one receiver, and the same receiver or exporter can serve several pipelines.
This configuration, trimmed from the Collector documentation, accepts OTLP from apps on the default ports and forwards traces to another Collector:
receivers:
otlp:
protocols:
grpc:
endpoint: localhost:4317
http:
endpoint: localhost:4318
exporters:
otlp_grpc:
endpoint: otelcol:4317
service:
pipelines:
traces:
receivers: [otlp]
exporters: [otlp_grpc]The Collector binds to localhost by default. The documentation’s own examples use 0.0.0.0 for convenience and point to its guidance on denial-of-service safeguards before you do the same.
For Azure Monitor, the Collector is the documented route into native OTLP ingestion: version 0.132.0 or later, the Azure authentication extension, and a Microsoft Entra identity with Monitoring Metrics Publisher on the data collection rule. It is also one place to filter or enrich telemetry from many services without redeploying each of them.