The Collector is the OpenTelemetry workhorse: it takes telemetry in, transforms it, and sends it wherever you choose.
The OpenTelemetry Collector is a vendor-neutral service that receives, processes and exports telemetry through a configurable pipeline of receivers, processors and exporters, so instrumentation is decoupled from any specific backend.
A Collector pipeline has three stages. Receivers ingest telemetry (over OTLP, by scraping Prometheus, by reading host or Kubernetes metrics). Processors transform it (batching, filtering, adding metadata, sampling). Exporters send it onward over OTLP or another format. You compose these into pipelines per signal.
The Collector runs in two common roles. As an agent it sits close to the workload (on each host or node) to collect local telemetry. As a gateway it runs centrally to aggregate, process and route data from many agents. Splitting the two keeps collection local and policy central.
Ops Singularity receives telemetry from OpenTelemetry Collectors over OTLP, so customers keep their existing collection topology and simply route governed signal to TelemetryOps and Sentinel AI.
No, SDKs can export directly to a backend, but the Collector is recommended because it decouples instrumentation from backends and centralises processing like batching and sampling.
An agent runs close to the workload to collect local telemetry; a gateway runs centrally to aggregate and route data from many agents.
Ops Singularity turns open telemetry into autonomous, governed resolution. See it on your own stack.