KCD SF Bay Area 2026 - Why Is Everyone Still Sending Raw Data

Why Is Everyone Still Sending Raw Data? - Julia Furst Morgado, Dash0 & Reese Lee, New Relic Most teams running the OTel Collector are using it as a passthrough. Data goes in, data goes out and everything lands in the backend whether it is useful or not. That gets expensive fast and it creates compliance problems when PII ends up in your traces. OTTL, the OpenTelemetry Transformation Language, ships with every Collector distribution and lets you filter, redact, and normalize telemetry data before it ever leaves your infrastructure. In this session we'll look at the syntax and architecture, walk through real transformation statements for the transform and filter processors, and cover the cases where OTTL makes more sense than building a custom component.