Quick start

Set up and collect telemetry in minutes!

The OpenTelemetry Collector receives telemetry such as traces, metrics, and logs, processes it, and forwards it to one or more observability backends through its component pipeline.

Note

This quick start demo creates a basic local setup. The goal is to show you how the Collector works, not to set up a production-ready environment.

In this guide, you will:

Start a local instance of the OpenTelemetry Collector
Generate trace data and send it to the Collector
Check that the Collector receives and processes the data

By the end, you will have a simple pipeline running on your machine and a clearer idea of how the Collector fits into an observability stack. If you want more context before getting started, see the Collector overview.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure your environment has the following tools installed:

Docker or any compatible container runtime — used to run the Collector
Go, one of the latest two minor versions — used to install the telemetry generator
GOBIN environment variable set — ensures installed Go binaries are available in your PATH¹

If GOBIN isn’t set, run:

export GOBIN=${GOBIN:-$(go env GOPATH)/bin}

This guide uses bash commands. If you’re using a different shell, you might need to adjust the command syntax.

Set up the environment

Pull the Docker image of the OpenTelemetry Collector core distribution:
```
docker pull otel/opentelemetry-collector:0.161.0
```
Install telemetrygen, which we’ll use to simulate a client that generates telemetry: