# OTel-Arrow Phase 2: From Efficient Transport to Efficient Telemetry Pipelines

DevFeed: [OTel-Arrow Phase 2: From Efficient Transport to Efficient Telemetry Pipelines](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/otel-arrow-phase-2-from-efficient-transport-to-efficient-telemetry-pipelines-32578.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://opentelemetry.io/blog/2026/otel-arrow-phase-2/>)

Author: OpenTelemetry Authors; Docs CC BY

Published: 2026-06-13T00:47:46Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Blog on OpenTelemetry](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/blog-on-opentelemetry.md>)

Topics: [OpenTelemetry](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/opentelemetry.md>), [telemetry](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/telemetry.md>), [Structured-data](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/structured-data.md>), [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/systems.md>), [Rust](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/rust.md>), [Instrumentation](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/instrumentation.md>)

Tags: [apache-arrow](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/apache-arrow.md>), [memory](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/memory.md>), [opentelemetry](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/opentelemetry.md>), [overhead](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/overhead.md>), [pipelines](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/pipelines.md>), [processors](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/processors.md>), [rust](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/rust.md>), [telemetry](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/telemetry.md>)

## AI overview

This article presents Phase 2 of OTel-Arrow, which uses Apache Arrow not only for transport through OTAP but also as the internal representation of telemetry pipelines. It describes the Rust-based OTel-Arrow Dataflow Engine and reports substantially lower transport and processing costs when telemetry remains on the OTAP path end to end.

## Source excerpt

Phase 1 of OTel-Arrow established OTAP, the OpenTelemetry Arrow Protocol, as an efficient transport protocol for OpenTelemetry. Apache Arrow is a language-independent, columnar in-memory format designed to move and process structured data efficiently across systems. We demonstrated that telemetry could be transported with significantly lower network overhead while preserving compatibility with the OpenTelemetry data model. Phase 2 asked a different question: what happens if Arrow is used not only on the wire, but also as the representation the pipeline works with internally?