Announcing BYOC and the OpenTelemetry Distribution Builder

Instead of deploying a patchwork of proprietary agents for every platform, a telemetry pipeline lets you route your data through a single, consistent layer—and send it to any backend you choose. Flexibility, achieved.

But there’s a catch.

If your pipeline is proprietary, you’ve only shifted the lock-in left. Sure, you can now add or swap destinations freely—but you’re still deeply dependent on a vendor in the middle of your data flow.

At Bindplane, we believe vendor neutrality shouldn’t stop at the destination. We built Bindplane entirely on OpenTelemetry, the open-source telemetry collection, processing, and export standard. You don't lose your pipeline if you decide to move on from Bindplane; you retain full control of your data.

Until now, the one exception was that Bindplane required our own OpenTelemetry Collector build—the Bindplane Distribution. It’s open source, powerful, and flexible, but it’s still a piece of your infrastructure that we maintain.

That changes today.

We’re making two big announcements that remove even that last layer of dependency—ensuring you never have to insert a vendor into your data plane again.

Bindplane adds support for “Bring Your Own Collector” (BYOC)

If you build and maintain your distro(s) of OpenTelemetry, you can now use those with Bindplane! Bindplane will recognize a new collector when it connects, understand which components it contains, and customize the experience for that specific collector.

This feature will soon be available in a private preview. If you're interested in trying it out early, sign up here.

OpenTelmetry Distribution Builder

Choosing an OpenTelemetry distribution isn’t easy. While OTel recommends building your own, that can be a daunting task—not just building it, but maintaining it over time. The OpenTelemetry Collector Builder (OCB) is a powerful tool and a solid foundation for building custom builds. It gets you most of the way there—but there’s still a fair amount of work involved in packaging across multiple platforms, automating releases, and smoothing out the overall developer experience.

Today, we’re releasing a new open-source tool to make it easy: the OpenTelemetry Distribution Builder (ODB). Building on and utilizing OCB at its core, ODB streamlines the process of building and managing your own OpenTelemetry Collector distribution—reducing complexity and increasing the accessibility of a vendor-neutral collector.

Just provide a manifest file, and ODB does the rest:

• Builds binaries for Linux, Windows, and macOS (using OCB)
• Generates installation packages with built-in best practices from the OTel community and Bindplane
• Creates versioned, hosted releases using GitHub Actions
• Automates upgrades—just update your manifest, and you’re done

Managing your own OTel distro has traditionally been a complex, error-prone process. ODB changes that. Now, you can get all the benefits of BYOC and follow OpenTelemetry’s recommended best practice—without needing to learn Go, wrangle release scripts, or maintain packaging logic.

And if you want to skip writing manifests altogether, check out OTel Hub, our visual UI for building custom distros with a single click. OTel Hub will be publicly available soon. If you'd like early access, you can sign-up here.

No lock-in. No bloat. Just your collector, your way.