OpenTelemetry Collector
Indicative from-price range
Indicative from-price range for self-hosting OpenTelemetry Collector on 2 servers: about $48 to $224 per month (USD), as of 2026-10-19, for the reference workload (Peak telemetry throughput (events/second): 100000; Number of pipelines: 3). From-price by provider, each the cheapest server in that provider's own shortlist: $48 on DigitalOcean (basic-2vcpu-4gb, 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, fra1); $98 on Google Cloud (e2-standard-2, 2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, us-central1); $127 on Amazon Web Services (c9g.large, 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, us-east-1); $128 on OVHcloud (rise-1, 6 vCPU, 32 GB RAM, eu-west); $132 on Hetzner (AX41, 6 vCPU, 64 GB RAM, eu-central); $133 on Microsoft Azure (D2as_v7, 2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, eastus); $524 on Servers.com (dl-01, 8 vCPU, 64 GB RAM, eu-west).
Reference workload
- Peak telemetry throughput (events/second): 100000
- Number of pipelines: 3
Methodology
This range is generated automatically from public provider price lists. It has not been reviewed by a person, it is not a quote, and it may differ from the total the calculator chooses for your own workload with its AI step. Method: the calculator's offer shortlist for the reference workload (the same ranking it builds before the AI step, up to 12 offers across providers; 12 here) is priced at its monthly list price in USD. The low end is the cheapest of the per-provider from-prices below and the high end is the median server of the combined shortlist, each multiplied by 2, the smallest baseline topology (gateway). The from-price for each provider applies the same method to that provider's own shortlist (the calculator's ranking restricted to that provider), so it is the cheapest server that ranking offers there, not a recommendation. Prices are taken from the price snapshot dated 2026-10-19; prices quoted in EUR are converted with the ECB reference rate dated 2026-10-19. Servers with fewer than 2 vCPU or less than 4 GB RAM are not priced. Only server rental list prices for the product's own servers are counted: dependencies, licences, support, traffic charges, taxes and setup fees are not included.
Price sources
- Amazon Web Services: https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/AmazonEC2/current/us-east-1/index.json
- DigitalOcean: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets
- Google Cloud: https://cloudbilling.googleapis.com/v1/services/6F81-5844-456A/skus
- Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com/_resources/app/data/app/live_data_en_EUR.json
- Microsoft Azure: https://prices.azure.com/api/retail/prices
- OVHcloud: https://eu.api.ovh.com/1.0/order/catalog/public/eco?ovhSubsidiary=FR
- Servers.com: https://www.servers.com/products/scalable-bare-metal
Size OpenTelemetry Collector for your own workloadMarkdown versionFor AI agents (llms.txt)
The OpenTelemetry Collector is a vendor-neutral service that receives, processes, and exports telemetry data — traces, metrics, and logs — decoupling instrumented applications from the specific observability backends they report to.
Baseline topologies
| Topology | Minimum nodes | Roles |
|---|---|---|
| gateway | 2 | otel-collector-gateway |
| agent-plus-gateway | 3 | otel-collector-agent, otel-collector-gateway |
What drives the cost
- Peak telemetry throughput (events/second)
- Peak combined throughput of traces, metrics, and logs flowing through the collector. Primary driver for CPU and memory.
- Number of pipelines
- Number of configured receiver/processor/exporter pipelines. Each pipeline adds processing overhead.
Where it runs
bare_metal, dedicated, cloud_vm
Size OpenTelemetry Collector and get a cost estimate