Note for reviewers: The OTLP page was added in #3360 (written by @felixbarny)

Slated for more improvements in #3179

is this accurate? the endpoint only works for self-managed deployments? I see references to elastic cloud below but I'm not sure what the relationship is between the note and the page

@theletterf did you happen to check this when reviewing the original PR? #3360

Yes, we specifically want to document that the ES OLTP endpoint is for self-managed only. For Cloud, we link to the Cloud OTLP Endpoint in the important section.

@marciw might be worth explaining a little in the important note the takeaway for self-managed folks

@felixbarny I'm thinking about moving the Best practices to the top of this page and restructuring the intro a bit.

But in the meantime, can you help clarify:

1. does the Elastic Cloud Managed OTLP endpoint work for both Elastic Cloud Hosted and Serverless?

2. are there basically 3 options?

• collector in gateway mode (recommended)
• Elastic Cloud Managed OTLP endpoint
• the OTLP/HTTP endpoint for self-managed, as described on your new page

Sounds good.

1. Yes. See also https://www.elastic.co/docs/reference/opentelemetry/motlp#send-data-to-elastic, which lists instructions for serverless and ECH
2. It's more like 2 options:

• For ECH/Serverless there's the managed OTLP Endpoint that users can send data to directly from their applications or from another OTel collector. (if you will, the managed OTLP Endpoint is a managed gateway collector)
• For self-managed, it's recommended that applications send their metrics to a gateway collector rather than directly to ES. The gateway collector may use the new OTLP Endpoint using the otlphttp exporter rather than the elasticsearch exporter for metrics (but at this point not for other signals).

@felixbarny when we say self-managed, do we mean ECE/ECK/vanilla cluster?