Agent

The agent collector deployment pattern consists of applications — instrumented with an OpenTelemetry SDK using OpenTelemetry protocol (OTLP) — or other collectors (using the OTLP exporter) that send telemetry signals to a collector instance running with the application or on the same host as the application (such as a sidecar or a daemonset).

Each client-side SDK or downstream collector is configured with a collector location:

1. In the app, the SDK is configured to send OTLP data to a collector.
2. The collector is configured to send telemetry data to one or more backends.

Example

A concrete example of the agent collector deployment pattern could look as follows: you manually instrument, say, a Java application to export metrics using the OpenTelemetry Java SDK. In the context of the app, you would set the OTEL_METRICS_EXPORTER to otlp (which is the default value) and configure the OTLP exporter with the address of your collector, for example (in Bash or zsh shell):

export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://collector.example.com:4318

The collector serving at collector.example.com:4318 would then be configured like so:

• Traces
• Metrics
• Logs

If you want to try it out for yourself, you can have a look at the end-to-end Java or Python examples.

Tradeoffs

Pros:

• Simple to get started
• Clear 1:1 mapping between application and collector

Cons:

• Scalability (human and load-wise)
• Inflexible