OTel Collector Receivers
Overview
The OpenTelemetry Collector gathers telemetry through receivers.
A receiver is a self-contained pipeline component that knows how to obtain data from one kind of source: a database, a message broker, a web server, a cloud service, an operating-system subsystem, or a wire protocol such as OTLP.
The Collector ecosystem publishes more than 100 receivers, catalogued in the upstream OpenTelemetry Collector receiver components reference and maintained in the opentelemetry-collector-contrib project.
Because Kloudfuse ingests OTLP, every receiver works unchanged when you point the Collector’s exporter at the Kloudfuse ingester — the telemetry a receiver produces flows into Kloudfuse alongside everything else the Collector gathers and becomes immediately queryable.
How Receivers Work
Each receiver runs as a component inside the Collector pipeline:
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Declare the receiver — add it to the
receivers:block of the Collector configuration with its connection settings (an endpoint, credentials, a file path, or a listen port). -
Wire it into a pipeline — reference the receiver in a
metrics,logs, ortracespipeline whose exporter points at Kloudfuse. -
Collect — on each scrape interval (for pull receivers) or continuously (for push and tail receivers) the receiver reads from the source and produces OTLP data.
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Forward to Kloudfuse — the pipeline’s processors batch and enrich the data, and the
otlphttpexporter sends it to the Kloudfuse ingester over HTTPS.
A receiver produces one or more signals:
- Metrics
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Numeric time series — scraped endpoints, host metrics, database statistics. Queryable with PromQL.
- Logs
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Log records — tailed files, container stdout, journald, Kubernetes objects. Queryable with FuseQL and LogQL.
- Traces
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Distributed traces accepted over OTLP or other trace protocols. Queryable with TraceQL and the APM views.
Most receivers produce metrics, many produce logs, and the protocol receivers (such as otlp) carry all three.
Supported Technologies
This is a categorized list of receivers by the kind of technology they collect from.
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You can find a comprehensive list of the supported receivers in our Reference Pages.