Hosts and VMs environments

Elastic Stack Serverless Observability

On host or virtual machine environments, deploy local, per-host OpenTelemetry Collector instances, here referred to as OTel Collector in Agent Mode.

These collectors have two main purposes:

1. The collection of local logs and infrastructure metrics. Refer to this sample config file for recommended Collector receiver configurations for hostmetrics and logs.
2. Enriching application telemetry from OTel SDKs that run within the instrumented applications on corresponding hosts with resource information.

See the recommended architectures per Elastic deployment scenarios:

Elastic Cloud Serverless provides a managed OTLP endpoint for ingestion of OpenTelemetry data.

Users can send their OTel data from the edge setup in OTel-native format through OTLP without any additional requirements for self-managed preprocessing of data.

As of Elastic Stack version 9.0 on Elastic Cloud Hosted (ECH), you need to run a self-hosted EDOT Collector in Gateway Mode to ingest OTel data from the edge setup in OTel-native format into the Elastic-hosted Elasticsearch.

The EDOT Collector in Gateway mode enriches and pre-aggregates the data for a seamless experience in the Elastic Observability solution before ingesting it directly into Elasticsearch.

If required, users can build their custom, EDOT-like Collector following these instructions.

In a self-managed deployment scenario, you need to host an EDOT Collector in Gateway mode that pre-processes and ingests OTel data from the edge setup into the self-managed Elastic Stack.