The collector acts as the service pipeline by gathering telemetry data from your applications and exporting it to a backend. With Splunk AppDynamics for OpenTelemetry™, the collector collects and sends distributed traces to the Splunk AppDynamics backend.

You can use one of the following two collectors:

• Splunk AppDynamics Distribution for OpenTelemetry Collector
• Splunk AppDynamics Distribution for OpenTelemetry Collector MSI
• OpenTelemetry Collector

The collector consists of these components:

• Receivers: Receives data from OpenTelemetry sources (tracers and SDKs).
• Processors: Allows additional processing of data, such as data enrichment and batching.
• Exporters: Converts the data into a specified format and sends the converted data to a chosen destination.
• Extensions: Extensions provide additional functionalities such as health monitoring, service discovery, and data forwarding. This does not involve processing telemetry data.

See the following sections to configure these components in your OpenTelemetry otel-config.yaml file. Once configured, the components must be enabled via pipelines in the service section.