In order to avoid vendor lock-in and provide choice to our customers, we want to invest efforts in an observability vendor agnostic platform that enables the collection of observability signals and delivery to the user's platform of choice.

Our approach to enable it is to provide an OpenTelemetry collector ready to collect metrics, logs and traces which follow the OTLP standard and export them in the same OTLP standard.

Considerations:

• By the time this Outcome is written, the level of maturity for the different components enabling this outcome is different depending on the telemetry signal. This means that some child issues may be blocked for a long time, but it's important to have a placeholder tracking status and progress.
• There is an high number (and increasing) of OTEL collector components) maintained and contributed by a large community: see https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib . 
• The Red Hat OpenShift distributed tracing team will not provide support to these components in general. We aim to only provide support to a short list compliant with the OTLP standard.
• While our strategy is to only provide support to the standard protocol, OTLP, we are aware that some components are the de-facto standard today. That's why some of the components are considered.
• Decisions on those components shall be tracked in child issues of this outcome.
• This outcome is not intended to replace the current observability platform.