How do I deploy OpenTelemetry Collector on Railway?

You can deploy OpenTelemetry Collector on Railway by clicking the "Deploy Now" button on this page. Railway will automatically set up all the necessary services and configurations for you.

What are the system requirements?

Railway handles all the infrastructure requirements. You only need a web browser to deploy and manage your application.

Is this template free to use?

Yes, this template is free to use within your existing Railway account.

Can I customize this template?

Yes, you can fully customize this template. After deployment, you will have full control of what you've deployed in your Railway project.

How do I get support for this template?

You can get support through our community forum: open-telemetry-collector-3e9ec3c1, or click "Get template help" for this template for more assistance.

Deploy and Host OpenTelemetry Collector on Railway

The OpenTelemetry (OTel) Collector is a vendor-agnostic way to receive, process, and export telemetry data. It acts as a central proxy for your observability pipeline, allowing you to shift the burden of data delivery away from your applications. By using a standalone collector, you can aggregate logs, metrics, and traces from multiple sources and reliably send them to an external OTLP-compatible backend.

About Hosting the OpenTelemetry Collector

Hosting a standalone OpenTelemetry Collector on Railway allows you to create a high-performance telemetry gateway with zero infrastructure overhead. This template deploys the collector pre-configured with an external OTLP HTTP exporter, enabling you to route data from your Railway services (or external apps) to any third-party observability platform or a remote LGTM stack.

Railway simplifies the deployment by managing service discovery and environment variables. Once deployed, your collector provides a stable internal endpoint for your other services, ensuring that telemetry data is buffered and retried even if your downstream provider experiences downtime.

Common Use Cases

Telemetry Aggregation: Collect data from multiple microservices and export it to a single external provider.
Protocol Translation: Receive data in various formats (OTLP, Jaeger, Zipkin) and normalize it before exporting.
Data Transformation: Mask sensitive information or add infrastructure-level attributes (like railway.service.id) to your spans and logs.
Offloading Workload: Reduce application overhead by moving heavy compression and batching logic to the collector.

Dependencies for OpenTelemetry Collector Hosting

OpenTelemetry Collector Contrib: The core binary responsible for data processing.
OTLP HTTP Exporter: The primary component for shipping data to external backends.

Deployment Dependencies

OpenTelemetry: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/
OpenTelemetry Collector: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/collector/

Implementation Details

This deployment utilizes Railway's private networking to receive data securely from your other services. It is configured to export data to an external OTLP/HTTP endpoint defined in your environment variables.

Internal Ingestion Endpoints (for your apps):

OTLP gRPC: http://${{RAILWAY_PRIVATE_DOMAIN}}:4317
OTLP HTTP: http://${{RAILWAY_PRIVATE_DOMAIN}}:4318

Required Configuration: To connect to your external provider, ensure the following variables are set:

Variable	Description
`RAILWAY_OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT`	The full URL of your external OTLP receiver (e.g., `https://otlp.example.com`).
`RAILWAY_OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_IS_INSECURE`	Set to `true` if your external endpoint does not use TLS (rare for production).
`RAILWAY_LOKI_ENDPOINT`	The full URL of your Loki receiver.
`RAILWAY_TEMPO_ENDPOINT`	The full URL of your Tempo receiver.
`RAILWAY_PROMETHEUS_ENDPOINT`	The full URL of your Prometheus receiver.
`VERSION`	The specific OTel Collector image tag.

Why Deploy OpenTelemetry LGTM on Railway?

Railway is a singular platform to deploy your infrastructure stack. Railway will host your infrastructure so you don't have to deal with configuration, while allowing you to vertically and horizontally scale it.

By deploying OpenTelemetry Collector on Railway, you are one step closer to supporting a complete full-stack application with minimal burden. Host your servers, databases, AI agents, and more on Railway.