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The OpenTelemetry Collector is a vendor-neutral way to receive, process, and export telemetry data. {agent} includes an embedded OTel Collector, enabling you to instrument your applications and infrastructure once, and send data to multiple vendors and backends.
When you run {agent} in otel mode it supports the standard OTel Collector configuration format that defines a set of receivers, processors, exporters, and connectors. Logs, metrics, and traces can be ingested using OpenTelemetry data formats.
For a full overview and steps to configure {agent} in otel mode, including a guided onboarding, refer to the Elastic Distributions for OpenTelemetry repository in GitHub. You can also check the elastic-agent otel command in the {fleet} and {agent} Command reference.
If you have a currently running {agent} you can transform it to run as an OTel Collector.