alt Hacker NewsPerhaps 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.
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A typical setup is to run a separate OpenTelemetry collector process on the same host as the app. The app connects to it via localhost on a standard port (although you can override it using env vars).
The collector process then sends the metrics/traces/logs to the observability sink. But there's nothing at all preventing you from sending telemetry directly to the observability sink.
It's just outbound HTTP or GRPC, and it doesn't have to go over public Internet.
> In a runtime like Lambda, how would you avoid the need to run an edge collector?
Here's my setup (in Go, very simplified):
> // Instantiate a new slog logger > logger := otelslog.NewLogger("root", otelslog.WithLoggerProvider(otelLogger)) > // Use the logger as needed
My code uses proper Go loggers exclusively. I also redirected the stdout and stderr to a goroutine (via the usual close(2)+open() trick) to serve as a catch-all sink for anything that slips the net.
(I’m not the person you replied to, but have experience here.)
I follow the [gateway deployment pattern](https://opentelemetry.io/docs/collector/deploy/gateway/). Everything sends telemetry to our gateway, which exports to ClickHouse (formerly Datadog).
We use Node.js, so all we need to do is run a script initializing Otel before running the app. We set this up following the docs a few years ago, and haven’t had to change it much since then.