OTel Collector
The OpenTelemetry Collector deployment that routes platform traces, metrics, and logs to storage backends.
Component Category
Telemetry and instrumentation / collection and routing
Component Description
OTel Collector is the platform's deployment of the OpenTelemetry Collector (opentelemetry-collector-contrib distribution), running as a standalone gateway. It receives OTLP traces, metrics, and logs over gRPC and HTTP, applies batching and memory-limiting processors, and routes each signal type to the appropriate backend.
This is the receiving and routing layer of the telemetry pipeline. Application-level instrumentation and SDK usage are covered separately in OpenTelemetry.
Why It Is Used
In BullSequana AI Runtime, OTel Collector centralizes telemetry ingestion so that instrumented services only need to know a single OTLP endpoint, instead of integrating separately with Prometheus, Grafana Loki, and Grafana Tempo. It also enriches every signal with consistent resource attributes (deployment.environment, cluster.name) before export, and protects the observability backends from ingestion spikes through batching and a memory limiter.
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Pipeline configuration
The collector runs in deployment mode (a standalone Deployment, not a per-node DaemonSet) and exposes an OTLP receiver on ports 4317 (gRPC) and 4318 (HTTP). Three signal pipelines are configured, each sharing the same memory_limiter, resource, and batch processors:
| Signal | Exporter | Destination |
|---|---|---|
| Traces | otlp/tempo | Grafana Tempo |
| Metrics | prometheus | Scraped by Prometheus via a ServiceMonitor |
| Logs | otlphttp/logs | Grafana Loki (via the Loki gateway's OTLP endpoint) |
The collector also exposes its own Prometheus metrics endpoint (:8889) so its internal health and throughput can be monitored like any other platform service.
Deployment notes
OTel Collector deploys as a single-replica Deployment in the otel-collector namespace at sync wave 10 in the common tier. It runs the opentelemetry-collector-contrib distribution in deployment mode, not as a per-node DaemonSet.
Interacts With
OpenTelemetryinstrumented services (CoreAI API,Model Installer,CoreAI Web Portal, and others), which emit OTLP traces, metrics, and logs to this collector.Grafana Tempo, which receives exported traces via OTLP/gRPC.Grafana Loki, which receives exported logs via the OTLP/HTTP logs endpoint.Prometheus, which scrapes the collector's Prometheus exporter for metrics.Grafana, which visualizes the metrics, logs, and traces routed through this collector.