Understand the Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector for Kafka design

The Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector for Kafka uses the OpenTelemetry Collector framework and includes three pipeline component types:

  • Receivers

  • Processors

  • Exporters

OpenTelemetry Collector pipeline with receivers, processors, and exporters

Receivers

The Kafka receiver collects data from a Kafka cluster. For configuration details, see the Kafka receiver documentation.

Processors

Processors are optional pipeline components that transform, filter, or drop data before export. The Splunk Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector for Kafka configures Splunk HTTP Event Collector (HEC) batching in the exporter sending_queue.batch setting instead of using a pipeline batch processor. For more information, see the OpenTelemetry Collector processor documentation.

Exporters

Use the Splunk HEC exporter to send data to a Splunk index. For configuration details, see the Splunk HEC exporter documentation.