[Operator] Support exporting internal-telemetry, metrics & logs, via OTLP

[cyrille-leclerc]

Component(s)

No response

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

The OpenTelemetry Operator currently exposes its internal metrics via the Prometheus Exposition Format and writes internal logs to stdout. Neither output supports OTLP, which significantly increases the complexity of monitoring and troubleshooting the Operator itself — especially in environments already built around the OpenTelemetry ecosystem.

Describe the solution you'd like

Add support for exporting internal telemetry (both metrics and logs) via OTLP.

Ideally, this would follow the standard OTel SDK configuration conventions — using environment variables — to keep the experience consistent with how users already configure other OpenTelemetry components.

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

No response

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[swiatekm]

We'd love to do this, but the number of changes is significant. The operator was written way before the Otel Go SDK was production ready, and a lot of its metrics and logs are effectively inherited from controller-runtime. Bridging this to otel is not trivial, which is why we haven't done it yet. I'll happily accept contributions getting us incrementally closed to being able to export via OTLP directly.