The OpenTelemetry (OTel) gateway deployment pattern helps platform teams scale telemetry data collection by aggregating telemetry data and centralizing processing tasks before routing it to observability backends. While gateway deployments provide teams with flexiblity, it can also complicate troubleshooting as telemetry data flows through multiple intermediary systems. When data volume drops, spikes, or encounters bottlenecks, engineers must consult multiple tools to understand the full pipeline and pinpoint root causes. The lack of complete visibility into OTel gateway architectures leads to increased operational overhead, slower incident triage, and ultimately leads to a longer mean time to resolution (MTTR).
Datadog Fleet Automation now addresses this fragmented troubleshooting with an end-to-end view of your OTel gateway architecture at the cluster level for the Datadog Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector (DDOT) and upstream-compatible OTel Collectors. By unifying visibility of your gateway architecture, traffic patterns, Collector configurations, and active monitor signals, Fleet Automation enables you to minimize context switching between tools, isolate problematic Collectors or components, and remediate issues faster.
