The OpenTelemetry Collector is one of my favorite OpenTelemetry (OTel) components. It’s a flexible and powerful data pipeline which allows you to ingest OTel data from one or more sources, transform it (including batching, filtering, and masking), and export it to one or more observability backends for analysis. It’s vendor-neutral. It’s extensible, meaning that you can create your own custom components for it. What’s there not to like?
Unfortunately, as it happens with many tools out there, it is also very easy to fall into some bad habits.

OpenTelemetry's platform is an observability framework, offering insights into distributed tracing, metrics collection, and log management for cloud-native applications. Through documentation, tutorials, and community contributions, OpenTelemetry provides insights into instrumenting applications to monitor performance and troubleshoot issues. Developers and DevOps teams can learn about distributed tracing standards, telemetry data formats, and integration with observability tools to gain visibility into complex distributed systems.

OpenTelemetry

Learn about the antipatterns to avoid when using OpenTelemetry Collector, including improper use of deployment modes, not monitoring Collectors, not using the right distribution, not updating Collectors, and not using the Collector where appropriate.

OpenTelemetry Collector Antipatterns