jmx_exporter VS opentelemetry-java

not quite sure if this is where I should be asking for help but i'm kind of befuddled about this whole situation. I'm trying to set up https://github.com/prometheus/jmx_exporter for our containerized Java application on our cluster. Specifically the JavaAgent as we are interested in getting the CPU and memory metrics especially. However, getting it initialized I am faced with this:

Prometheus doesn't deal with logs at all - only metrics. Even just for metrics, you have several different choices depending on how your Java application is running. You may be able to use the JMX Exporter to expose the metrics that you would then scrape with Prometheus. For the logs, you'll need something like Fluent Bit as an agent to grab ('tail' in Fluent Bit input terms) the logs and send them to Elasticsearch or Grafana Loki.

- https://github.com/prometheus/jmx_exporter - https://github.com/lightbend/kafka-lag-exporter (Export Kafka Topics Lag Metrics) - https://github.com/danielqsj/kafka_exporter (Export Kafka Metrics) - https://github.com/obsidiandynamics/kafdrop (Topic Administration tool - create/edit/delete topics & view messages)

Usually I use a javaagent that transforms the JMX metrics into prometheus style metrics, for example: https://github.com/prometheus/jmx_exporter/blob/116a1c4b3fafcfbb9e566b34e130ccc805f331fc/example_configs/kafka-0-8-2.yml

Another good one is to add the jmx_exporter agent plugin. This allows easy collection of real-time performance metrics.

In our case, we add sink connectors for AWS Kinesis and Google Cloud PubSub. We also add a Prometheus exporter JAR that scrapes the Kafka Connect JMX metrics and exposes them as Prometheus metrics.

After doing some research it appears this class references internal packages and therefore "makes it unusable for modern Java apps" (https://github.com/prometheus/client_java/issues/533 , https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-java/issues/4192)

For monitoring: If you want to go the open source route, the open telemetry ecosystem is booming. You could use the open telemetry java agent along with their collector, and then use Elastic APM, which could give you a good starting point. Here is a small example project I found on github that was fun to play around with and explore the capabilities of a setup like this: https://github.com/riferrei/otel-with-apache-pulsar

OpenTelemetry and Java Flight Recorder (JFR) cover most bases. Use the OpenTelemetry Java agent if you want auto-instrumentation or just the APIs if you want to do your own instrumentation.

opentelemetry-java - contains components for manual instrumentation as well as the API and SDK.

opentelemetry-java This repo is the main OpenTelemetry Java SDK and provides components for manual instrumentation. Top-level components include OpenTelemetry API, extensions, SDK, bridge layers for OpenTracing and OpenCensus.