Operating OpenTelemetry at scale with OpAMP

As more organizations move to use OpenTelemetry in production at scale, with multiple Collectors across heterogeneous environments, a new challenge arises: how to remotely manage, configure, and update this agent fleet in a consistent and secure... As more organizations move to use OpenTelemetry in production at scale, with multiple Collectors across heterogeneous environments, a new challenge arises: how to remotely manage, configure, and update this agent fleet in a consistent and secure way? This is where Open Agent Management Protocol (OpAMP) comes into the picture: it provides a standardized protocol that lets a central backend automatically configure agents, push updates, monitor their health, and collect status information. In a recent episode of OpenObservability Talks, I sat down with Andy Keller, OpAMP maintainer and Principal Engineer at BindPlane, to hear what OpAMP is and how it makes large-scale observability deployments much easier to operate and control. We also covered project status and roadmap, including a hot KubeCon update you don’t want to miss. OpenObservability Talks: Operating OpenTelemetry at Scale with OpAMP Why OpAMP: The management challenge at scale As OpenTelemetry adoption has exploded, organizations are finding themselves managing increasingly complex collector deployments. Before OpAMP, the landscape was fragmented and challenging. Andy shared their journey: “We probably developed in-house three, four, maybe five different agent management protocols. Some were HTTP-based, long polling. We used WebSockets. We used protobufs. We used JSON.” The problem becomes acute when you consider the scale and variety of deployments. We’re not just talking about a handful of collectors — organizations are deploying collectors everywhere from massive gateways to embedded devices. Each deployment model brings its own management challenges, and the teams responsible for deploying collectors are often different from the observability teams who need to

As more organizations move to use OpenTelemetry in production at scale, with multiple Collectors across heterogeneous environments, a new challenge arises: how to remotely manage, configure, and update this agent fleet in a consistent and secure... As more organizations move to use OpenTelemetry in production at scale, with multiple Collectors across heterogeneous environments, a new challenge arises: how to remotely manage, configure, and update this agent fleet in a consistent and secure way? This is where Open Agent Management Protocol (OpAMP) comes into the picture: it provides a standardized protocol that lets a central backend automatically configure agents, push updates, monitor their health, and collect status information. In a recent episode of OpenObservability Talks, I sat down with Andy Keller, OpAMP maintainer and Principal Engineer at BindPlane, to hear what OpAMP is and how it makes large-scale observability deployments much easier to operate and control. We also covered project status and roadmap, including a hot KubeCon update you don’t want to miss. OpenObservability Talks: Operating OpenTelemetry at Scale with OpAMP Why OpAMP: The management challenge at scale As OpenTelemetry adoption has exploded, organizations are finding themselves managing increasingly complex collector deployments. Before OpAMP, the landscape was fragmented and challenging. Andy shared their journey: “We probably developed in-house three, four, maybe five different agent management protocols. Some were HTTP-based, long polling. We used WebSockets. We used protobufs. We used JSON.” The problem becomes acute when you consider the scale and variety of deployments. We’re not just talking about a handful of collectors — organizations are deploying collectors everywhere from massive gateways to embedded devices. Each deployment model brings its own management challenges, and the teams responsible for deploying collectors are often different from the observability teams who need to configure them. This disconnect creates operational friction that can undermine your entire observability strategy. Scale and variety of OTel Collector deployments I found the sub-story about the diversity of OpenTelemetry collector deployments staggering. “We see anything from a couple massive OpenTelemetry gateways where really what you’re doing is managing the configuration of the gateway and doing all the processing there,” said Andy, “but then we also even see people deploying collectors to embedded devices. We have collectors in point of sale machines. We have collectors on laptops collecting Windows events for security tracking.” The scale ranges from dozens to millions of collectors. When you factor in IoT and embedded use cases, the numbers become truly massive. As Andy noted, when you get into the embedded space, it gets to millions of collectors that you need to start reasoning about. What is the Open Agent Management Protocol (OpAMP) OpAMP (Open Agent Management Protocol) is a standardized protocol that provides remote management capabilities for observability agents, primarily the OpenTelemetry Collector (which is why it resides under the OpenTelemetry project). It enables central backends to automatically configure agents, push updates, monitor their health, and collect status information — all in real-time over WebSocket or HTTP connections. Managing OpenTelemetry Collectors with OpAMP. Source: opentelemetry.io What’s particularly interesting is how OpAMP has evolved beyond simple configuration management. As Andy explained: “It started to really focus on configuration management and with agent health and component health and things like that, really moving into this observability for your observability realm. Because observability is something that is so critical to operations that you need to know is your observability actually working?” To me, this evolution reflects a crucial insight: your observability infrastructure is too important to be a black box. You need observability for your observability . OpAMP addresses this by providing real-time visibility into collector health, configuration drift, and operational status. There was a great talk at last year’s KubeCon North America 2025, in which Nike’s observability platform engineers shared how they built an enterprise-grade implementation of OpAMP for their scale and use case. OpAMP protocol and components OpAMP, as the name suggests, is first and foremost a network protocol specification, used to remotely manage large fleets of data collection Agents. The protocol is elegantly simple: just two messages — server-to-agent and agent-to-server — defined using Protocol Buffers. The specification lives in the opamp-spec repository under OpenTelemetry, while opamp-go provides the reference implementation in Go. The architecture includes several key components. The OpAMP extension is a read-only component that reports current configuration and health status. The OpAMP supervisor sits as a separate process alongside the collector, implementing both read and write capabilities. As Andy described it: “It kind of sits between the management platform and the collector. It speaks to the collector on behalf of the management platform, and it can accept changes.” The supervisor’s approach is particularly clever — it writes new configurations to disk, shuts down the collector, and restarts it with the new configuration. Critically, it includes safety mechanisms: “If it doesn’t start, it will revert the config and run with the last known good config so that we’re not breaking your telemetry pipelines remotely.” Supervisor-based management with OpAMP. Source: gihub.com/open-telemetry Beyond OTel Collector: OpAMP for Kubernetes, SDKs and more What makes OpAMP powerful is its protocol-level flexibility. The configuration payload is intentionally generic — just a map of name-value pairs. This allows OpAMP to manage not just OpenTelemetry collectors, but any type of agent. In f

As more organizations move to use OpenTelemetry in production at scale, with multiple Collectors across heterogeneous environments, a new challenge arises: how to remotely manage, configure, and update this agent fleet in a consistent and secure... As more organizations move to use OpenTelemetry in production at scale, with multiple Collectors across heterogeneous environments, a new challenge arises: how to remotely manage, configure, and update this agent fleet in a consistent and secure way? This is where Open Agent Management Protocol (OpAMP) comes into the picture: it provides a standardized protocol that lets a central backend automatically configure agents, push updates, monitor their health, and collect status information. In a recent episode of OpenObservability Talks, I sat down with Andy Keller, OpAMP maintainer and Principal Engineer at BindPlane, to hear what OpAMP is and how it makes large-scale observability deployments much easier to operate and control. We also covered project status and roadmap, including a hot KubeCon update you don’t want to miss. OpenObservability Talks: Operating OpenTelemetry at Scale with OpAMP Why OpAMP: The management challenge at scale As OpenTelemetry adoption has exploded, organizations are finding themselves managing increasingly complex collector deployments. Before OpAMP, the landscape was fragmented and challenging. Andy shared their journey: “We probably developed in-house three, four, maybe five different agent management protocols. Some were HTTP-based, long polling. We used WebSockets. We used protobufs. We used JSON.” The problem becomes acute when you consider the scale and variety of deployments. We’re not just talking about a handful of collectors — organizations are deploying collectors everywhere from massive gateways to embedded devices. Each deployment model brings its own management challenges, and the teams responsible for deploying collectors are often different from the observability teams who need to configure them. This disconnect creates operational friction that can undermine your entire observability strategy. Scale and variety of OTel Collector deployments I found the sub-story about the diversity of OpenTelemetry collector deployments staggering. “We see anything from a couple massive OpenTelemetry gateways where really what you’re doing is managing the configuration of the gateway and doing all the processing there,” said Andy, “but then we also even see people deploying collectors to embedded devices. We have collectors in point of sale machines. We have collectors on laptops collecting Windows events for security tracking.” The scale ranges from dozens to millions of collectors. When you factor in IoT and embedded use cases, the numbers become truly massive. As Andy noted, when you get into the embedded space, it gets to millions of collectors that you need to start reasoning about. What is the Open Agent Management Protocol (OpAMP) OpAMP (Open Agent Management Protocol) is a standardized protocol that provides remote management capabilities for observability agents, primarily the OpenTelemetry Collector (which is why it resides under the OpenTelemetry project). It enables central backends to automatically configure agents, push updates, monitor their health, and collect status information — all in real-time over WebSocket or HTTP connections. Managing OpenTelemetry Collectors with OpAMP. Source: opentelemetry.io What’s particularly interesting is how OpAMP has evolved beyond simple configuration management. As Andy explained: “It started to really focus on configuration management and with agent health and component health and things like that, really moving into this observability for your observability realm. Because observability is something that is so critical to operations that you need to know is your observability actually working?” To me, this evolution reflects a crucial insight: your observability infrastructure is too important to be a black box. You need observability for your observability . OpAMP addresses this by providing real-time visibility into collector health, configuration drift, and operational status. There was a great talk at last year’s KubeCon North America 2025, in which Nike’s observability platform engineers shared how they built an enterprise-grade implementation of OpAMP for their scale and use case. OpAMP protocol and components OpAMP, as the name suggests, is first and foremost a network protocol specification, used to remotely manage large fleets of data collection Agents. The protocol is elegantly simple: just two messages — server-to-agent and agent-to-server — defined using Protocol Buffers. The specification lives in the opamp-spec repository under OpenTelemetry, while opamp-go provides the reference implementation in Go. The architecture includes several key components. The OpAMP extension is a read-only component that reports current configuration and health status. The OpAMP supervisor sits as a separate process alongside the collector, implementing both read and write capabilities. As Andy described it: “It kind of sits between the management platform and the collector. It speaks to the collector on behalf of the management platform, and it can accept changes.” The supervisor’s approach is particularly clever — it writes new configurations to disk, shuts down the collector, and restarts it with the new configuration. Critically, it includes safety mechanisms: “If it doesn’t start, it will revert the config and run with the last known good config so that we’re not breaking your telemetry pipelines remotely.” Supervisor-based management with OpAMP. Source: gihub.com/open-telemetry Beyond OTel Collector: OpAMP for Kubernetes, SDKs and more What makes OpAMP powerful is its protocol-level flexibility. The configuration payload is intentionally generic — just a map of name-value pairs. This allows OpAMP to manage not just OpenTelemetry collectors, but any type of agent. In f