Why your OTel Collector config is probably wrong
Five misconfigurations we see in almost every brownfield OTel Collector deployment, and how to catch them before they cost you.
OpenTelemetry | Observability | Agentic Operations
Brownfield environments are our home. How to migrate from proprietary telemetry, multiple single-pane-of-glass tooling, alert fatigue, and out-of-control monitoring budgets to a world of open standards?
The problem
Proprietary telemetry instrumentation & collection, custom query languages, and data formats that keep you tethered to contracts you've outgrown.
Teams using two or more of: Datadog, Grafana, Amazon CloudWatch, New Relic, Splunk, and Dynatrace.Nobody planned it, but we have to pay for all of it.
Observability bills that grow faster than your infrastructure. Custom metrics, log ingestion from dev/test, and cardinality explosions eating your budget.
Thousands of alerts, little to no actionable signal. Our on-call teams drowning in noise while real incidents slip through.
The solution
Resources
We maintain a curated list of tools for working with OpenTelemetry and brownfield observability stacks.
Deep technical content on OpenTelemetry best practices: span naming, attribute conventions, collector tuning. From the people who build the Collector.
Weekly curated observability newsletter by Michael Hausenblas covering OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Fluent Bit, and the broader CNCF ecosystem.
The official OTel project blog. Release notes, roadmap updates, semantic convention changes, and community spotlights straight from the maintainers.
Practical deep-dives on Grafana, Loki, Tempo, Mimir, and their OpenTelemetry integrations. Strong coverage of fleet management and collector operations.
Broad cloud-native coverage with excellent OpenTelemetry reporting. Frequent features on OTel roadmap, sampling strategies, and the economics of observability.
Community-maintained collection of observability resources: tools, tutorials, use cases, and learning paths. A great starting point for teams new to OTel.
The canonical reference. Covers SDKs, Collector, semantic conventions, and instrumentation guides across all supported languages.
Get in touch
Whether you're drowning in dashboards or just starting to question your observability bill, we'd love to hear from you. No pitch decks, no pressure. Just a conversation.