alt Hacker News> 4. You're basically forced to run both gateway collectors and edge collectors for any realistic usage.
You most certainly don't. You can run your app (especially if it's "serverless") without the collector agent.
App-to-agent and agent-to-sink use the same protocol, so all you need to do is set up the tracing/logging/metrics exporters to directly speak with the sink. These days, it typically means specifying the URL and the DSN header.
Perhaps there's a gap in my understanding. Can you clarify on this a bit more? I run a mix of serverless and non-serverless workloads.
Gateway collectors are unavoidable because various SaaS platforms require you to be running publicly reachable endpoints to send telemetry to.
In a runtime like Lambda, how would you avoid the need to run an edge collector? The only thing that comes to mind is to write to logs and then have a log stream processor that then writes to your gateway collector. Other than that, it seems unavoidable, no? Sure, in something like Fargate you could go app to sink. But even that has its own tradeoffs.