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 info.
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.
Correlating infrastructure with OpenTelemetry APM
The following examples demonstrate using the collector to correlate APM OpenTelemetry data with infrastructure. 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 can detect this correlation data and construct relationships between APM and infrastructure entities.