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Encoding Extension

Status Maintainers: @atoulme, @dao-jun, @dmitryax, @MovieStoreGuy, @VihasMakwana Source: opentelemetry-collector-contrib

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Overview

The encoding extensions can be used by compatible receivers or exporters to encode or decode data into/from a specific format. This is useful when the data is being sent to/from a system that expects a specific format and doesn’t support the OpenTelemetry protocol. 🚧 Under active development 🚧

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Component Milestones

To help track what work needs to be done with this component, these are the currently active goals being worked towards.

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Development

  • Add encoding extensions support additionally to the existing ways of configuring encodings (where applicable) to the following components:
    • file receiver
    • file exporter
    • kafka receiver
    • kafka exporter
    • kinesis exporter
    • pulsar receiver
    • pulsar exporter
  • Add encoding extensions for open source formats, ie: otlp, zipkin, jaeger
  • Deprecate the previously available ways of configuring encodings (where applicable).
  • Remove the previously available ways of configuring encodings in favour of using the encoding extension.

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Example configuration

extensions:
  zipkin_encoding:
    protocol: zipkin_proto
    version: v2

receivers:
  kafka:
    traces:
      encoding: zipkin_encoding
    # ... other configuration values
Last generated: 2026-06-01