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The AppSignal Collector is a program that collects and processes your application’s data and sends it to AppSignal’s servers. It receives error, performance and metric data over OpenTelemetry, making it easier to monitor and analyze your application’s behavior.

Set up a collector

AppSignal can host a collector for you. You can also run your own as a Linux package or a container using our Docker image. The hosted vs self-hosted comparison helps you choose, and the installation guide walks you through both.

Reporting to the collector

Our Ruby and Python integrations can report to a collector instead of to the agent they bundle. They instrument your application for you, so this is the shortest route if you use one of those languages: AppSignal for PHP always sends its data through a collector. Set its collector_endpoint option to your collector’s URL, as the PHP installation guide shows. For Elixir and Node.js, report to a collector with OpenTelemetry instead of the AppSignal package. Follow the Elixir or Node.js OpenTelemetry installation guide. For a language we do not have an integration for, instrument your application with the OpenTelemetry SDK and point it at the collector. Read our OpenTelemetry documentation for how to do that. The Go and Java installation guides cover those languages, and the generic installation guide lists the endpoints for any other.

Features

The collector has the following features:
  • Receive OpenTelemetry tracing data.
  • Receive OpenTelemetry metrics data.
  • Receive OpenTelemetry log data. This needs collector 0.6.0 or newer.
  • Collect host metrics from the host it’s running on.