The OpenTelemetry Collector Guide for Production Teams

A practical guide to running the OTel Collector in production.

Running OTel in production is not the same as adopting OTel. Most teams default to otelcol-contrib because it’s fast to deploy, but convenience and production readiness are two different things.

This guide from Datadog walks you through eight steps to move from that baseline to a production-hardened OTel Collector setup. You’ll learn how to:

• Stop running otelcol-contrib in production and choose the right distribution for your scale
• Build a pipeline that survives outages and traffic spikes without silent data loss
• Govern your Collector fleet before version drift and config sprawl cause an incident