@BentiGorlich You don't necessarily need a collector. But you need something that can receive data in OTLP format.

Prometheus has that in beta: https://prometheus.io/docs/guides/opentelemetry/

You can configure where the app should be sending data with those environment variables: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/languages/sdk-configuration/otlp-exporter/

If you wish to run the collector anyway (which provides a lot of things, such as turning spans into metrics), you can look into this doc: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/collector/