Stage 2 · Lesson 5 of 6
OpenTelemetry and the Collector
OpenTelemetry is the vendor-neutral standard for , metrics and logs: SDKs and auto-instrumentation in each language, the OTLP protocol, and the . The Collector receives telemetry, processes it and exports it, configured as pipelines of receivers, processors and exporters.
Processors do the useful work: batching, adding attributes such as environment, dropping noisy data and sampling. Running a Collector as an agent on each node or as a central gateway means send to one place, and you can change backends later without touching code. You traced a request in the DevOps roadmap; here you run the pipeline.
Common trapdefining a processor in the config and forgetting to add it to a pipeline, so it silently does nothing.
A question to check yourself, an AI practice session and 1 cheat sheet entry come with the full roadmap. Unlock
Resources for this stage
Start with· follow one of these
- GuideFreePrometheus Documentation
Prometheus · Intermediate
Free: the first steps guide, then the querying basics, functions and histograms pages
- CoursePaidPrometheus Certified Associate (PCA) Prep Course
KodeKloud · Intermediate · Subscription
Paid, hands-on labs for PromQL, recording rules, Alertmanager and Kubernetes monitoring
Practise
Keep handy
Also worth your time
The chapter that defines the four golden signals and what makes monitoring worth paging on