OTel in Practice: The OTel Collector: My Homelab Multitool

For the very first OTel in Practice of 2026, the OTel End User SIG is pleased to present "The OTel Collector: My Homelab Multitool" with Josh Lee, Senior Developer Advocate at Altinity.

From Josh:

"A typical “homelab” monitoring stack involves many different telemetry sources talking directly to different backends: Promtail sends logs to Loki, Prometheus Node Exporter and cAdvisor are scraped by Prometheus, and instrumented applications may send traces straight to Jaeger.

But what if our homelab monitoring stack behaved like a real observability platform?

With the OpenTelemetry Collector, it can!

In this talk, I’ll show how I use OpenTelemetry Collectors both as traditional per-node agents and as a centralized ingestion gateway. This approach simplifies management, standardizes ingestion, and lets me freely experiment with different storage backends and observability platforms, without constantly re-instrumenting or rewiring my stack."