Open Observability Summit + OTel Community Day 2025

The OpenTelemetry (OTel) Collector is a core component of OpenTelemetry. As a vendor-neutral agent, it is the backbone of modern observability pipelines, transforming how you monitor infrastructure and applications. Over the last year, we worked closely with Collector’s internals as we rolled out a build of the Collector. We’ve also contributed to the Collector and we’ve worked extensively with customers to run the Collector at scale.

The Collector has an extremely componentized architecture, however, like with any tools, it’s hard to grasp the internal workings and its hidden capabilities. In this talk, we’ll peel back the layers to reveal the many components and APIs—documented and undocumented—that makes up the OTel Collector. We will introduce with lesser-known extensions, connectors, providers, and converters.

The Collector provides a great out of the box experience - but when things go wrong, you need to understand the fundamentals of how data flows through the Collector. We’ll introduce you to the little-known but essential ‘exporthelper’, which powers the queueing, batching, and persistence of data passing through the collector.