Document relationship between available OT Collector Docker images

[PaulBenn-UnlikelyAI]

Hi, there are currently at least three different images for the OpenTelemetry Collector:

• otel/opentelemetry-collector
• otel/opentelemetry-collector-dev
• otel/opentelemetry-collector-contrib

The difference between these three images does not seem to be clearly documented anywhere.

It would be good to see a section of documentation with a comparison between all available OTel Collector images. This would aid users in selecting the correct collector for their use case.

It might also be worth documenting the relationship of the three images above to platform-specific images such as aws-observability/aws-otel-collector.

[ctaggart]

I had the same question: What is the difference between:

1. https://hub.docker.com/r/otel/opentelemetry-collector
2. https://hub.docker.com/r/otel/opentelemetry-collector-dev
3. https://hub.docker.com/r/otel/opentelemetry-collector-contrib

I spent some time investigating it out just now. Here is what I found out. There are two Dockerfile's:

• 1 & 2 from https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector/blob/main/cmd/otelcol/Dockerfile
• 3 from https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/blob/main/cmd/otelcontribcol/Dockerfile

1 is for releases and 2 is for main branch commits.

Hope that helps.

[jpkrohling]

We need a better place to document this, and the current state isn't the final, but here's a short description:

• open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector has the core code, that serves as library for all distributions
• open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-releases produces the main official distribution and publishes the container image otel/opentelemetry-collector
• open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib has other non-official components at varying states of maturity and quality. They are all bundled into the "contrib" distribution and published as the container otel/opentelemetry-collector-contrib. Eventually, the building of the distribution will be moved to this repository here.