NeophyteCollectors: Open Telemetry vs. LM Collector
Hi,
We're looking to create a networking "appliance" that we can send to small locations, like a retail store. Among other things, this appliance will allow us to do some gateway to gateway tunneling allowing for user support, but in addition, we want to include key devices in monitoring as well.
Originally, we were thinking that we would do a LM Collector install in a container on the device (in this case, we were experimenting with a MikrtoTik). The problem is that LM Collector supports Linux on 64-Bit AMD installs, but not 64-bit ARM installs which many (most?) appliance types would use.
Open Telemetry, however, can be used in a 64-bit ARM container.
On the surface, it appeared that we could maybe use an Open Telemetry collector for basic stuff instead of LM Collector. But, the closest I get to a comparison of what Open Telemetry collector can do, compared to LM Collector is that Open Telemetry collects "telemetry" and LM Collector collects "metrics" ... which are, of course, entirely useless descriptions if you don't know already what they are doing. :)
I understand that they are not interchangeable, but in the end, I'm trying to determine a few things:
- if not interchangeable, what to use each for?
- can Open Telemetry collector be used for the most basic monitoring?
- any other ideas for Linux 64-bit ARM based collector?
Since every time I ask anything close to this question to support, I get pointed to the links about Open Telemetry collector, let me pre-empt that (to avoid that in the answer) and say that we've looked at these links:
https://www.logicmonitor.com/support/adding-an-opentelemetry-collector
https://www.logicmonitor.com/support/configurations-for-opentelemetry-collector-container-installation
https://www.logicmonitor.com/support/opentelemetry-collector-for-logicmonitor-overview
https://www.logicmonitor.com/support/opentelemetry-collector-installation-from-contrib-distribution
https://www.logicmonitor.com/support/opentelemetry-collector-installation-from-logicmonitor-wizard
and they don't answer the questions above, far as we can tell. :)
Don't get me started on the lack of ARM support. Raspberry Pi collectors would be dope.
LM Collectors receive tasks from the platform and execute those tasks to collect data from endpoints on the same network as the collector. OpenTelemetry collector cannot execute LogicMonitor collection tasks. You would get no data for DataSources, no discovery, no pinging, nothing to do with active data collection.
OTel collectors are open source and LM has written a plugin that allows telemetry data sent via a few different protocols to OTel collectors to stream that data to LM. Usually that data is for Distributed Tracing, which is an APM capability.
LM Collectors = infrastructure monitoring
OTel Collectors = APM
