Source

A source is an inbound receiver: syslog, OTLP gRPC/HTTP, file tail, journald, Kafka, Prometheus scrape, hostmetrics — anything in the OTel ecosystem that produces telemetry for the collector to forward.

A source by itself is a type, not a running thing. To start ingesting, activate it on a collector.

Source Activation

Activating a source creates a Source Activation — the per-collector instance of that receiver. It carries the runtime configuration:

• Listen port + bind address (for receivers that open a socket)
• Parser settings (severity mapping, timestamp extraction, multiline rules)
• Resource attributes that get stamped on every record (service.name, deployment.environment, etc.)
• An optional input filter that drops records before they enter any route

The source picker on a collector's Inputs tab. Each card is a receiver type; clicking one opens the activation form.

A single source type can be activated multiple times on the same collector with different settings — for example, two syslog activations listening on different ports for two different upstream applications.

Where it lives

Surface	Path
UI	Collector detail → Inputs tab
Storage	YAML file at gitops/collectors/<collectorID>/sources/<activationID>.yaml
Generated config	The collector’s rendered OTel config has one receiver block per activation

The YAML is the source of truth. Every change made in the UI commits to the gitops working tree; the agent picks up the new config on the next sync.

See also

• Collector — where activations live
• Route — wires an activation through a pipeline to one or more destinations
• Add a collector — activates a starter source as part of enrolment