Hi,
Happy to help try to break this down.
In your first point, you mention that an application is hosted on the Internet and you’re unable to send traces directly to Observability Cloud. Normally, you can do exactly that. You should be able to configure your application instrumentation to send directly to Observability Cloud by setting a few env vars or javaagent flags. (e.g., SPLUNK_ACCESS_TOKEN, OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_PROTOCOL, OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_ENDPOINT)
Example, here is docs for how to do that with a Java app. https://help.splunk.com/en/splunk-observability-cloud/manage-data/instrument-back-end-services/instrument-back-end-applications-to-send-spans-to-splunk-apm/instrument-a-java-application/instrument-your-java-application
It looks like your second point may be describing some on-prem servers or applications where you want to use an “intermediate server”. You can use a Splunk OpenTelemetry collector gateway for this. You can configure the gateway to send metrics and traces to Observability Cloud and export your logs to your Splunk Enterprise/Cloud/Heavy Forwarder. https://help.splunk.com/en/splunk-observability-cloud/manage-data/splunk-distribution-of-the-opentelemetry-collector/get-started-with-the-splunk-distribution-of-the-opentelemetry-collector
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