Building a Dry-Run Mode for the OpenTelemetry Collector

Teams continuously deploy programmable telemetry pipelines to production, without having access to a dry-run mode. At the same time, most organizations lack staging environments that resemble production – especially with regards to observability and other platform-level services. Despite knowing the potential risks involved due to the lack of a proper safety harness, most teams have no alternative, safe way to determine what telemetry they can actually cut to improve their signal-to-noise ratio without running the risk of missing something important.

So, teams resort to experimenting on live traffic.