The OpenTelemetry Collector is a powerful tool for building telemetry data pipelines, allowing users to collect, process, and export data from various sources in a highly configurable and extensible manner. It can accept different formats of telemetry data, such as Prometheus, Jaeger, Kafka, and Zipkin, and apply common processing before exporting it to a backend observability platform. The Collector has two main deployment methods: agent and gateway. An agent is a program that collects telemetry data from a host and forwards it to a collector, while a gateway receives data from multiple agents and sends it to configured backends. The OpenTelemetry Collector can also be used as an agent on every host, enriching the data with host metadata before forwarding it on. It is highly configurable and extensible, allowing users to adapt it to their environment and add custom exporters as needed. The collector has two main deployment methods: agent and gateway. An agent is a program that collects telemetry data from a host and forwards it to a collector, while a gateway receives data from multiple agents and sends it to configured backends. The OpenTelemetry Collector can also be used as an agent on every host, enriching the data with host metadata before forwarding it on. It is highly configurable and extensible, allowing users to adapt it to their environment and add custom exporters as needed.