Collector

A collector is an OpenTelemetry runtime running on a host you operate. LinkMesh enrols it, delivers config to it, and watches its health.

Each collector owns:

• A set of active sources
• A set of routes wiring those sources through pipelines to destinations
• Health metrics flowing back to the server

The runtime is upstream

A collector runs one of two upstream runtimes — LinkMesh ships no collector distribution of its own. The runtime you pick determines how the collector receives its config from the LinkMesh server; see Add a collector for the onboarding flow:

• Grafana Alloy — config via remotecfg (the collector polls the LinkMesh server over Bearer-authenticated HTTPS and applies the config it fetches).
• otelcol-contrib + opampsupervisor — config via OpAMP (the LinkMesh server pushes remote config over WebSocket Secure and the supervisor applies it).

You install upstream Alloy or otelcol-contrib yourself and connect it directly; either way the component set is whatever the upstream runtime ships — Alloy’s full component catalogue, or otelcol-contrib’s.

Note

The optional linkmesh-agent is a separate onboarding helper, not part of the collector. It discovers services and log sources to pre-fill the onboarding wizard; it does not install, supervise, or configure the collector, and the collector runs fine without it.

What about Collector Groups

A Collector Group is N collectors sharing one config — used for redundancy or scale-out. Group-scoped sources, routes, and destinations materialise on every member at config-generation time, so a fleet stays in lockstep without copy-pasting per collector.