Consider what supporting OTLP over Apache Arrow looks like

[cartermp]

See this blog post: https://opentelemetry.io/blog/2023/otel-arrow/

OTLP over Apache Arrow is beginning to be a thing, and it purports to achieve a lot less data over the wire. That's great! But maybe not so great for us since we'd have to figure out how to ingest it.

For now, the project is focused on sending data from two collectors: https://opentelemetry.io/blog/2023/otel-arrow/#how-can-i-leverage-the-opentelemetry-protocol-with-apache-arrow-in-my-deployment

That is, Collector A compresses data and sends over Arrow to Collector B, which turns the data back into OTLP and finally exports it. No other deployment patterns are considered supported at the time of writing this issue.

Eventually, the project will stabilize and it may be expected that OTLP backends also support otlp-over-arrow. That time isn't now (at time of writing this issue), but it's worth spending a little time to figure out what that support may look like.