Dynatrace OTel Collector distribution amplifies OpenTelemetry integration for scalable, production-ready observability

Dynatrace is announcing the Dynatrace OTel Collector distribution, an OpenTelemetry Collector with components that are fully tested, reliable, secure, and supported for use in production and enterprise-scale environments. OpenTelemetry provides a flexible, standardized way to collect telemetry data, and its adoption is growing. The Dynatrace OTel Collector distribution hardens OpenTelemetry functions for organizations that need to maintain high-reliability service-level agreements. The Dynatrace OTel Collector is free and available to everyone. Dynatrace donates bug fixes and enhancements back to the OpenTelemetry project and provides full support for customers.

OpenTelemetry standardizes how organizations instrument, generate, and collect telemetry data for analysis and provides community-based support. Because of its flexibility, this open source approach to instrumenting and collecting telemetry data is becoming increasingly important in large-size organizations. But rigorous requirements for security, production readiness, scalability, and reliability can make adopting OpenTelemetry challenging for teams to maintain at enterprise scale.

To meet these requirements, Dynatrace has released its OpenTelemetry Collector distribution (Dynatrace OTel Collector), providing users with a fully tested, secure, and reliable OpenTelemetry collector for production and enterprise-scale environments. The distribution is fully supported for Dynatrace customers at standard and premium levels.

Growing OpenTelemetry adoption drives the need for production-level reliability, security, and stability

OpenTelemetry provides a standardized way for organizations to instrument, generate, and collect telemetry data. Organizations use it to collect and send data to a backend, such as Dynatrace, that can analyze software performance and behavior. As a result of its standardized, flexible approach, OpenTelemetry is growing fast in popularity.

In fact, according to technology intelligence analyst firm HG Insights, OpenTelemetry is the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s second most active project after Kubernetes and is used by more than 1,600 organizations worldwide, with customer adoption growing at a compound annual growth rate of 59%. More than 60 vendors support OpenTelemetry.

Likewise, the OpenTelemetry Project Journey Report states that more than 9,000 contributors and 1,100 companies have contributed to OpenTelemetry since the project’s inception in 2019. Dynatrace is among the project’s top contributors.

Before OpenTelemetry and the W3C Trace Context open standard that underpins it, observability vendors had to reverse-engineer tracing libraries. Now, developers can build software libraries and use OpenTelemetry to add tracing and telemetry directly into them so an observability analytics backend, such as Dynatrace, can consume the data immediately.

Depending on their requirements, Dynatrace customers can ingest enriched telemetry data using OneAgent^® or the Dynatrace OTel Collector to export to Dynatrace. OneAgent provides the enriched telemetry automatically. OpenTelemetry is natively supported by middleware and cloud providers and can ingest telemetry data directly. Used together, Dynatrace extends OpenTelemetry observability, and OpenTelemetry extends Dynatrace observability.

“At Dynatrace, we firmly believe that a thriving observability ecosystem benefits not only our customers but also our valued partners,” said Alois Reitbauer, Chief Technology Strategist at Dynatrace. “Our unwavering commitment to open source initiatives underscores our mission to foster transparency, collaboration, and innovation. Together, we shape the future of observability, empowering organizations to unlock actionable insights and elevate their cloud-native experiences.”

The Dynatrace OTel Collector distribution brings OpenTelemetry production readiness to everyone

Building on the flexibility and strengths of OpenTelemetry, the Dynatrace OTel Collector provides production-readiness for organizations that need to maintain highly reliable software environments and service-level agreements. Dynatrace does the work of maintaining the distribution, fixing bugs, and verifying that components, such as receivers and exporters, are stable, secure, and work reliably, saving developers time and resources. In addition, as a top contributor to the OpenTelemetry standard, Dynatrace donates bug fixes and enhancements back to the project.

Releasing the Dynatrace OTel Collector reinforces the company’s commitment to open source software and democratizing how organizations collect data from cloud infrastructure and applications. In open source tradition, the Dynatrace OTel Collector distribution is free and available for everyone.

“OpenTelemetry is gaining increasing importance in collecting telemetry data,” Reitbauer said. “With our collector distribution, we provide an enterprise-ready way for users to collect data reliably and leverage the power of the Dynatrace platform on their data.”

Using the Dynatrace OTel Collector, developers can safely and reliably collect telemetry data from different sources and send it to Dynatrace for analysis using the Grail™ data lakehouse and Davis® hypermodal AI. The Dynatrace OTel Collector also seamlessly integrates with Dynatrace OpenPipeline™, a stream-processing technology, to filter, process, and contextualize data for optimal use with Dynatrace if customers choose to use it as their backend.

As developers add OpenTelemetry to their applications, they can use the Dynatrace distribution to provide the instrumentation without needing to configure infrastructure. With deep analytics of traces from Dynatrace, developers have data in full context, which helps them easily debug instrumentation issues.

Dynatrace OTel Collector benefits free for everyone—full support for customers

The Dynatrace distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector provides stable and reliable production-ready OpenTelemetry data collection for Dynatrace customers and noncustomers alike, for free. Dynatrace customers receive full support at standard and premium levels.

• Dynatrace-verified collector components. Dynatrace verifies all the integrated collector components including receivers and exporters to ensure they operate seamlessly in production environments.
• Innovation from the open source community. The OpenTelemetry Collector has an active community that constantly brings new features and innovation. The Dynatrace distribution introduces the latest features, but only after the Dynatrace team has fully tested them and can recommend them for production.
• Sample configurations and documentation. Dynatrace Documentation includes example configurations for the key use cases, as well as for non-Dynatrace customers.
• Immediate Security patches. Dynatrace contributes feature enhancements and fixes back to the community to benefit the entire open source project and all its users. However, with this distribution, Dynatrace can release critical patches faster and independently of the upstream OpenTelemetry release cycle.
• Dynatrace standard or premium support. For Dynatrace customers, the Collector comes with proactive customer guidance and support, technical account management, flexible contact options, and proven expertise. With the help of support, customers can get an easy start with the Dynatrace OTel Collector.

Dynatrace OTel Collector distribution makes common use cases easier at enterprise scale

By ingesting OpenTelemetry data using a fully tested, secure, and reliable collector, teams can easily maintain service-level agreements. Following are a few common use cases that the Dynatrace OTel Collector distribution makes easier at enterprise scale.

• Migrating logs from several sources. Organizations commonly use OpenTelemetry to migrate logs from multiple sources. Besides collecting OpenTelemetry data, users can run the Dynatrace OTel Collector to collect all logs from receivers such as syslog, fluentd, or Kubernetes, enrich them, and export them to Dynatrace (or other backends).
• Mask data for privacy and compliance. Using the Collector to mask data to adhere to privacy and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulations is another common use case. Users can run the Dynatrace OTel Collector to mask sensitive data next to applications and ensure that no sensitive data leaves the internal network. Users can also filter telemetry data for all signals (traces, metrics, and logs).
• Ingest and multiplex data. The fully tested Dynatrace OTel Collector distribution also handles ingesting and multiplexing log data for use by different analytics tools and backends, such as Dynatrace for observability, security, and business analytics.

If teams are using the Dynatrace platform as their analytics backend, they benefit from unified analysis of all their observability, security, and business data in full context.

Get started with the Dynatrace OTel Collector

To learn more about the Dynatrace OTel Collector distribution, see the blog Enhance data collection with Dynatrace OTel Collector distribution.