Glossary
OTLP (OpenTelemetry Protocol)
OpenTelemetry's protocol for sending traces, metrics and logs over gRPC or HTTP, which Azure Monitor now accepts natively through the OpenTelemetry Collector.
OTLP is how OpenTelemetry components talk to each other: an app’s OTLP exporter to a Collector, one Collector to another, or a Collector to a backend. The specification defines it over gRPC and over HTTP, with default ports 4317 for gRPC and 4318 for HTTP. Pointing an app at a Collector is usually one environment variable:
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://otel-collector:4318Azure Monitor’s native OTLP ingestion reached general availability in June 2026. The path Microsoft documents runs through the OpenTelemetry Collector: version 0.132.0 or later, with the Azure authentication extension and a Microsoft Entra identity that holds Monitoring Metrics Publisher on the data collection rule. Each signal has its own endpoint under the rule’s streams (Microsoft-OTLP-Traces, Microsoft-OTLP-Logs and a custom metrics stream), and metrics must use delta temporality. Data on this path lands in OpenTelemetry tables such as OTelSpans and OTelLogs, where the client IP is always recorded as 0.0.0.0.
Inside an app, OTLP export is optional. The Microsoft OpenTelemetry Distro for .NET can send OTLP alongside Azure Monitor, though Microsoft doesn’t officially support that exporter, and the Java agent doesn’t export OTLP at all. Microsoft hasn’t documented sending OTLP from an SDK straight to Azure Monitor without a Collector.