# Can the same OpenTelemetry traces go to more than one tool?

Yes. Once your agent exports OpenTelemetry spans, they're just data on the wire, and nothing stops more than one system from reading them. The usual way is an OpenTelemetry Collector sitting between your agent and the outside world: it receives one stream of spans, and its pipeline config can list several exporters, each pointed at a different backend, so the same trace reaches an observability tool and an eval tool without your application code knowing either exists. Without a Collector, some SDKs let you register more than one span processor directly, each with its own exporter, which does the same fan-out at the cost of running both exports in-process instead of at a separate hop. The tradeoff to plan for is volume: every additional destination is a full copy of every span leaving your network, so cost and egress bandwidth scale with the number of exporters, not just with traffic.

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Sources:
- OpenTelemetry Collector documentation: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/collector/ (fetched 2026-08-25)

Source: https://tessary.ai/answers/instrumentation/can-the-same-traces-go-to-more-than-one-tool
More on Instrumentation: https://tessary.ai/answers/instrumentation
From Tessary, agent reliability for AI agents in production: https://tessary.ai