OpenTelemetry Collector Deployment Patterns

The versatility of OpenTelemetry Collector and its various deployment patterns

• OpenTelemetry Collector can be used for tracing, metrics, and logs
• Deployment patterns include fan out, normalizer, sidecar, multi-cluster, and multi-tenant
• Collectors can be chained together and customized for specific needs
• Mix and match components and collector instances for optimal deployment

One advantage of using a sidecar deployment pattern is the ability to fine-tune the configuration for each collector to the necessities of that application or deployment. This is especially useful for critical applications that require specific configurations.

The OpenTelemetry Collector is a versatile piece of software and can be deployed in numerous ways. In this talk, we’ll explore some of these patterns, starting with the classic “agent and collector” and landing at “scalable tail-based sampling,” talking about “multi-tenancy” along the way. We’ll see how they look in theory and practice with live demos on a real Kubernetes cluster. You’ll leave this session with knowledge about some of the essential processors for the OpenTelemetry Collector, how to employ them individually, and as part of a vaster deployment topology.