How Green Is My OpenTelemetry Collector? - Nancy Chauhan, Student & Adriana Villela, Dynatrace
Nancy Chauhan, Student, Adriana Villela, Dynatrace
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 · Session
In an era where the environmental impact of technology is under increasing scrutiny, the talk "How Green Is My OpenTelemetry Collector?" presented by Adriana Villela and Nancy Chauhan at KubeCon EU, delves into a critical, yet often overlooked, aspect of cloud-native operations: the energy consumption of observability tools. Specifically, this presentation focuses on the **OpenTelemetry Collector**, a pivotal component in modern observability stacks responsible for ingesting, processing, and exporting telemetry data. The speakers highlight that while OpenTelemetry is indispensable for understanding application and infrastructure health, its operation—from data emission to ingestion and storage—consumes significant computational resources, thereby contributing to the IT sector's growing carbon footprint.
AI review
This talk by Villela and Chauhan tackles a critical, often-ignored aspect of cloud-native operations: the energy consumption of observability tools, specifically the OpenTelemetry Collector. Leveraging tools like Kepler and eBPF, they provide a practical methodology and concrete experimental results on how to measure and reduce the carbon footprint of telemetry pipelines. The findings, particularly the counter-intuitive overhead of splitting collector instances versus the significant gains from custom collector builds, offer actionable insights for any SRE or platform engineer looking to…