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Overview

Meridian is an engineer-first tool for proving OpenTelemetry Collector changes before merge. It is not a linter with a nicer UI and it is not a hosted validation service. It is a pragmatic CLI and GitHub Action that produces evidence a reviewer can trust.

What Meridian is

At a high level, Meridian does four things:

  • reads Collector configuration from local files, rendered directories, and supported Collector-native config URIs
  • validates that configuration at both the repo level and the Collector-distribution level
  • runs a deterministic runtime harness against a patched config
  • writes durable artifacts for authors, reviewers, and CI maintainers

Design goals

Meridian is built around a few explicit product priorities:

  • local-first usage
  • deterministic default behavior
  • reviewable outputs over opaque automation
  • artifact-first execution
  • concrete, Go-first implementation boundaries

These priorities shape both the user experience and the code structure.

Intended users

Meridian is primarily for:

  • platform engineers who own shared Collector configurations
  • observability engineers who review telemetry routing and processing changes
  • application teams that want pre-merge confidence for Collector edits
  • CI maintainers who need a repeatable PR validation loop

Adoption path

The recommended sequence is:

  1. start with validate
  2. move to check in safe mode
  3. inspect the generated artifacts
  4. add assertions or contracts where your review standard needs them
  5. wire ci into pull requests with the composite action

Meridian becomes significantly more valuable once teams rely on artifact review rather than terminal output alone.