Which of the following describes a receiver in OpenTelemetry?

The receiver in OpenTelemetry is correctly described as a component that accepts data in various formats. This is essential in the context of observability, where diverse sources of telemetry data may be generated from different services, applications, or infrastructure. A receiver is tasked with ingesting this data, which can vary in codec, format, and protocol, and usually is expected to support multiple formats to accommodate the needs of various systems and applications. This flexibility enables integration with different telemetry outputs, such as tracing, metrics, and logging data, making it a critical component in the data pipeline for observability solutions.

Other choices do not accurately define a receiver's function within OpenTelemetry. For instance, a component that stores telemetry data refers more to a storage backend or database rather than a receiver, which is concerned with data ingestion. Similarly, a data format for structured serialization pertains to how data is formatted for storage or transmission, not how it is received. Lastly, while an operation represented as a span relates to the tracing aspect of observability, it does not pertain directly to the function of a receiver itself.