The OpenTelemetry Collector is a vendor-agnostic tool for receiving, processing, and exporting telemetry data. While Collector requirements and configuration will vary, it comes with a variety of receivers and processors which make it popular for infrastructure monitoring. It's also common to use the Collector for data processing, but this documentation focuses on infrastructure monitoring use cases. See OpenTelemetry Collector for data processing for more information.
Receiving infrastructure telemetry
The following examples demonstrate using the Collector to monitor various infrastructure components. The general pattern is to configure the Collector with a technology specific or general purpose receiver (i.e. prometheus) to scrape or poll data from an infrastructure target, and export the data to New Relic via OTLP.
- Docker repo example
- HCP Consul repo example
- HiveMQ repo example
- Hosts repo example
- Kafka Confluent Cloud repo example
- Prometheus repo example
- Redis repo example
- Singlestore repo example
- Squid repo example
- StatsD repo example
Correlating infrastructure with OpenTelemetry APM
The following example demonstrates using the Collector to correlate APM OpenTelemetry with infrastructure data:
The general pattern is to configure the Collector with a processor which detects and enriches the APM telemetry with additional environment context in the form of resource attributes, before exporting the data to New Relic via OTLP. New Relic detects this correlation data and constructs relationships between APM and infrastructure entities via resources.
OpenTelemetry Collector for Kubernetes monitoring
While Collector requirements and configuration will vary, it comes with a variety of receivers and processors which make it popular for Kubernetes monitoring. Getting all the required telemetry requires scraping various Kubernetes APIs using multiple receivers with differing permission requirements, so to keep things simple for you, we built a helm chart that uses our custom distribution of the collector nrdot-collector-k8s under the hood. For more details on how to get started, please refer to OpenTelemetry for Kubernetes.