Run Elastic Agent as an OTel Collector

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This functionality is in technical preview and may be changed or removed in a future release. Elastic will work to fix any issues, but features in technical preview are not subject to the support SLA of official GA features.

The OpenTelemetry Collector is a vendor-neutral way to receive, process, and export telemetry data. Elastic Agent includes an embedded OTel Collector, enabling you to instrument your applications and infrastructure once, and send data to multiple vendors and backends.

When you run Elastic Agent in otel mode it supports the standard OTel Collector configuration format that defines a set of receivers, processors, exporters, and connectors. Logs, metrics, and traces can be ingested using OpenTelemetry data formats.

For a full overview and steps to configure Elastic Agent in otel mode, including a guided onboarding, refer to the Elastic Distributions for OpenTelemetry repository in GitHub. You can also check the elastic-agent otel command in the Fleet and Elastic Agent Command reference.