OpenTelemetry Collector

Pricing and hosting

Pricing

Free

Open source

Yes (Apache-2.0)

Self-hosted

Yes

Launched

2019

Status

Active

Website

opentelemetry.io

Plans and prices change; check the tool's own site before you decide.

What it does

OpenTelemetry and telemetry pipelines checklist

8 of 9 confirmed in OpenTelemetry Collector's own documentation. The same checklist is used for every tool in Pipelines.

• + OTLP in and out Yes
• + Logs Yes
• + Metrics Yes
• + Traces Yes
• + Transform and redact Yes
• + Routing to many destinations Yes
• + Durable buffering Yes
• + Sampling or volume reduction Yes
• ? Central fleet management Not confirmed

Transform, routing and sampling components are in the contrib distribution; OpAMP defines remote management but needs a separate OpAMP server

Checked against: opentelemetry.io, github.com, github.com (2), github.com (3), github.com (4), opentelemetry.io (2)

Alternatives to OpenTelemetry Collector

Other opentelemetry and telemetry pipelines tools. See all 22.

• AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry AWS-supported distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector and SDKs, preconfigured to send traces and metrics to CloudWatch, X-Ray, Amazon Managed Prometheus and partner backends.
• Bindplane Telemetry pipeline built on OpenTelemetry: manages fleets of collectors from one console and filters, samples and routes logs, metrics and traces to any backend. Cloud or self-hosted.
• Chronosphere Telemetry Pipeline Log pipeline from the creators of Fluent Bit (formerly Calyptia): manages Fluent Bit agent fleets and transforms, reduces and routes logs to observability and SIEM backends.
• Cribl Telemetry pipeline (Cribl Stream, Edge, Search and Lake) that filters, reshapes and routes logs between collectors and destinations such as Splunk or S3 to cut volume.
• Edge Delta Telemetry pipelines that process logs, metrics and traces at the edge before they reach a backend, now sold alongside AI agents for root-cause investigation.
• Fluent Bit Lightweight C log and metrics processor from the Fluentd project, common as the node-level agent in Kubernetes. Ships to Loki, Elasticsearch, cloud logging and OTLP.
• Fluentd CNCF graduated log collector that reads, parses, buffers and forwards logs to hundreds of outputs through a plugin system. Written in Ruby and C.
• Grepr Pipeline that sits in front of Datadog, Splunk or New Relic, summarises repetitive logs and traces before they are indexed, and keeps raw data in S3 for backfill during incidents.
• Honeycomb Refinery Open source tail-based sampling proxy for traces: buffers whole traces and keeps errors, slow requests and a sample of the rest before forwarding to Honeycomb.
• Mezmo Telemetry pipeline (formerly LogDNA) that ingests, deduplicates, enriches and routes logs, metrics and traces, with an AI SRE agent that uses the cleaned data for root-cause analysis.
• NXLog Log collection agent and platform strong on Windows event logs: collects, converts and forwards logs to SIEM and observability tools. A free Community Edition is also available.
• Odigos Uses eBPF to add OpenTelemetry tracing to applications on Kubernetes without code changes and sends the data to any backend.