{"slug": "opentelemetry-collector", "name": "OpenTelemetry Collector", "category": "observability", "category_name": "Monitoring and analytics", "description": "", "recommenders": 3, "commenters": 4, "warners": 0, "score": 2.949, "rising": 0.35, "first": "2025-11-07", "latest": "2026-10-19", "why": "I strongly recommend pre-filtering with the open source `opentelemetry-collector`", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 3, "neutral": 1, "compare": 0, "warn": 0}, "spark": [1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "I strongly recommend pre-filtering with the open source `opentelemetry-collector`", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": null, "github_repo": "github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-proto", "official_url": "https://opentelemetry.io/docs/collector/", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["OpenTelemetry Collector"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 802421200, "item_id": 50151325, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50151325", "by": "CharlieDigital", "date": "2026-10-19", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I strongly recommend pre-filtering with the open source `opentelemetry-collector`", "excerpt": "If you are using a Datadog, Langfuse, Langchain, or other OTEL target, you do nothing. Just query it. Build alerts, dashboards, and datasets; whatever you normally do with your OTEL collector. A forward OTEL collector deployment is still useful for filtering but the Datadog Agent, for example, already has buffering and filtering built into it. If you want to deploy your own collector and write your own handler (e.g. ", "context": "", "use_case": "telemetry pre-filtering", "switched_from": "", "story": "If you don't run your own LLM proxy, how do you know whats going on?"}, {"id": 802418084, "item_id": 50151130, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50151130", "by": "CharlieDigital", "date": "2026-10-19", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Host an OpenTelemetry collector[3][4] or rely on your existing collector infra", "excerpt": "You don't need a proxy to do this. I would argue you should not use a proxy to do this because the end result is a single point of failure direct in the line of your productivity. Both Codex[0] and Claude Code[1] output OTEL traces that you can ingest and process. Other harnesses like OpenCode, Pi, etc. you can hook into their plugin architecture and implement your own OTEL emission from a plugin (or use an off the s", "context": "", "use_case": "collecting agent traces", "switched_from": "", "story": "If you don't run your own LLM proxy, how do you know whats going on?"}, {"id": 760593569, "item_id": 47537098, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47537098", "by": "ehostunreach", "date": "2026-03-26", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "you could also use OTel collectors to collect and forward logs to a central OTel collector instance", "excerpt": "Since this is an OTel-related submission, you could also use OTel collectors to collect and forward logs to a central OTel collector instance. > yes it doesn\u2019t solve the UI problem for those, but it does solve collecting your logs I work for Netdata and over the last couple months, we've developed an external Netdata plugin that can ingest/index OTel logs [1]. The current implementation stores logs in systemd-compati", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "OpenTelemetry Profiles Enters Public Alpha"}, {"id": 733542576, "item_id": 45846411, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45846411", "by": "jitl", "date": "2025-11-07", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "The collector is a helm chart, someone on my project added it to our K8s clusters last week", "excerpt": "Otel collector or complete Otel stack with data storage and ui etc? The collector is a helm chart, someone on my project added it to our K8s clusters last week. It was like 30 lines of YAML/Terraform in total. Logs, trace forwarding, Prometheus scraping. That bit is easy. Idk about deploying the ui/storage. I\u2019ve used Grafana Loki stuff in Docker Compose locally without much head scratching for local development. http", "context": "", "use_case": "telemetry collection", "switched_from": "", "story": "OpenTelemetry: Escape Hatch from the Observability Cartel"}]}], "caveats": [], "who": [], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["telemetry pre-filtering", "collecting agent traces", "telemetry collection"], "compared": [{"slug": "datadog", "name": "Datadog", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "grafana-loki", "name": "Grafana Loki", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50145507", "title": "If you don't run your own LLM proxy, how do you know whats going on?", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49514895", "title": "How we configured OpenTelemetry logs in Rails", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47532339", "title": "OpenTelemetry Profiles Enters Public Alpha", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45809835", "title": "OpenTelemetry: Escape Hatch from the Observability Cartel", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"recommend": 1}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {}, "2026-07": {}, "2026-08": {}, "2026-09": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-10": {"recommend": 1}}, "versions": [], "version_unnamed": 0, "family_ref": null, "runs_on": null, "lines": [], "quotes": [{"id": 802421200, "item_id": 50151325, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50151325", "by": "CharlieDigital", "date": "2026-10-19", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I strongly recommend pre-filtering with the open source `opentelemetry-collector`", "excerpt": "If you are using a Datadog, Langfuse, Langchain, or other OTEL target, you do nothing. Just query it. Build alerts, dashboards, and datasets; whatever you normally do with your OTEL collector. A forward OTEL collector deployment is still useful for filtering but the Datadog Agent, for example, already has buffering and filtering built into it. If you want to deploy your own collector and write your own handler (e.g. ", "context": "", "use_case": "telemetry pre-filtering", "switched_from": "", "story": "If you don't run your own LLM proxy, how do you know whats going on?"}, {"id": 802418084, "item_id": 50151130, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50151130", "by": "CharlieDigital", "date": "2026-10-19", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Host an OpenTelemetry collector[3][4] or rely on your existing collector infra", "excerpt": "You don't need a proxy to do this. I would argue you should not use a proxy to do this because the end result is a single point of failure direct in the line of your productivity. Both Codex[0] and Claude Code[1] output OTEL traces that you can ingest and process. Other harnesses like OpenCode, Pi, etc. you can hook into their plugin architecture and implement your own OTEL emission from a plugin (or use an off the s", "context": "", "use_case": "collecting agent traces", "switched_from": "", "story": "If you don't run your own LLM proxy, how do you know whats going on?"}, {"id": 792298497, "item_id": 49518656, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49518656", "by": "madduci", "date": "2026-09-01", "version": null, "stance": "neutral", "quote": "If you are using the OtelCollector", "excerpt": "If you are using the OtelCollector, you can export logs to Grafana Loki, to have them visualised see: https://grafana.com/docs/loki/latest/send-data/otel/", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "How we configured OpenTelemetry logs in Rails"}, {"id": 760593569, "item_id": 47537098, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47537098", "by": "ehostunreach", "date": "2026-03-26", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "you could also use OTel collectors to collect and forward logs to a central OTel collector instance", "excerpt": "Since this is an OTel-related submission, you could also use OTel collectors to collect and forward logs to a central OTel collector instance. > yes it doesn\u2019t solve the UI problem for those, but it does solve collecting your logs I work for Netdata and over the last couple months, we've developed an external Netdata plugin that can ingest/index OTel logs [1]. The current implementation stores logs in systemd-compati", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "OpenTelemetry Profiles Enters Public Alpha"}, {"id": 733542576, "item_id": 45846411, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45846411", "by": "jitl", "date": "2025-11-07", "version": null, "stance": "recommend", "quote": "The collector is a helm chart, someone on my project added it to our K8s clusters last week", "excerpt": "Otel collector or complete Otel stack with data storage and ui etc? The collector is a helm chart, someone on my project added it to our K8s clusters last week. It was like 30 lines of YAML/Terraform in total. Logs, trace forwarding, Prometheus scraping. That bit is easy. Idk about deploying the ui/storage. I\u2019ve used Grafana Loki stuff in Docker Compose locally without much head scratching for local development. http", "context": "", "use_case": "telemetry collection", "switched_from": "", "story": "OpenTelemetry: Escape Hatch from the Observability Cartel"}]}