What are Connectors in OpenTelemetry? 

The OpenTelemetry Collector plays many different roles in the observability ecosystem. One of its most important roles is that of a telemetry processor. Recent upgrades to the Collector have enhanced its ability to condense, derive, replicate, and reason about telemetry streams. This is achieved with a new class of pipeline components called Connectors.

Connectors are a bridge between telemetry pipelines. They can forward and replicate data from one pipeline to another, summarize verbose telemetry streams, and ultimately help you get the right data to the right place. I recently had the privilege of speaking about these new capabilities at Kubecon. If you want a crash course on the OpenTelemetry Collector and the capabilities of connectors, I think you’ll find the following talk helpful.