opentelemetry-collector VS VictoriaMetrics

But how does one monitor a Collector? The OTel Collector already emits metrics for the purposes of its own monitoring. These can then be sent to your Observability backend for monitoring.

Maybe, you are asking yourself: "But I already had instrumented my applications with vendor-specific libraries and I'm using their agents and monitoring tools, why should I change to OpenTelemetry?". The answer is: maybe you're right and I don't want to encourage you to update the way how you are doing observability in your applications, that's a hard and complex task. But, if you are starting from scratch or you are not happy with your current observability infrastructure, OpenTelemetry is the best choice, independently of the backend telemetry tool that you are using. I would like to invite you to take a look at the number of exporters available in the collector contrib section, if your backend tracing tool is not there, probably it's already using the Open Telemetry Protocol (OTLP) and you will be able to use the core collector. Otherwise, you should consider changing your backend telemetry tool or contributing to the project creating a new exporter.

To receive OTLP data, you set up the standard otlp receiver to receive data in HTTP or gRPC format. To forward traces and metrics, a batch processor was defined to accumulate data and send it every 100 milliseconds. Then set up a connection to Tempo (in otlp/tempo exporter, with a standard top exporter) and to Prometheus (in prometheus exporter, with a control exporter). A debug exporter also was added to log info on container standard I/O and see how the collector is working.

You can find more details on advanced configurations here.

> opentelemetry is basically a house of antipatterns

"Look on My Works Ye Mighty and Despair!"

https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector/tr... -> https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-re... ... and then a reasonable person trying to load that mess into their head may ask 'err, what's the difference between go.opentelemetry.io/collector and github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib?'

  $ curl -fsS go.opentelemetry.io/collector | grep go-import

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector: OpenTelemetry Collector (github.com)

There are 2 collector types: the core and the contrib. I have used the contrib as it features the splunk_hec exporter.

We are setting the deployment to have exactly 1 replica and setting the container CPU and memory limits according to the minimum that was checked for performance in their docs.

Lightstep ingests data in native OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) format, so we will use the OTLP Exporter. The exporter can be called either otlp or follow the naming format otlp/. We could call it otlp/bob if we wanted to. We're calling our exporter otlp/ls to signal to us that we are using the OTLP exporter to send the data to Lightstep.

Then, we set up a batch processor that batches up the spans together and every 1 second sends the batch forward. In production, you would want more than 1 second, but I set this here to 1 second for instant feedback in Jaeger.

VictoriaMetrics CTO here.

The referred library is the official OpenTelemetry package for reading metrics in Go language [1] - more details are available at [2].

Note that we at VictoriaMetrics like the idea of unified observability standard like OpenTelemetry. The issue is in the current otel implementation. It is too bloated and very inefficient. This contradicts to our experience with observability cases, which need very optimized format for metrics' transfer in order to reduce costs on CPU and network traffic needed to transfer and process these metrics.

VictoriaMetrics continues investing in OpenTelemetry by providing integration docs [3] and improving the existing functionality for otel metrics' ingestion [4].

[1] https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-proto-go

[2] https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics/pull/2570...

[3] https://docs.victoriametrics.com/guides/getting-started-with...

[4] https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics/issues/60...

Victoria Metrics

VictoriaMetrics is primarily a time-series database designed for efficiently storing and querying time-series data. It is often used as a back-end data store for time-series data generated by monitoring systems like Prometheus. VictoriaMetrics excels at handling large volumes of time-series data, offering efficient storage and query capabilities.

Not sure I follow since there are very competitive tools written in Go such as https://victoriametrics.com for an example in this space.

Did you try VictoriaMetrics [1] and vmagent [2]? It is a single self-contained binary without external dependencies. It requires relatively low amounts of CPU, RAM, disk space and disk IO, and it runs on ARM.

[1] https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics/

[2] https://docs.victoriametrics.com/vmagent.html

https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics#cardinali...

If I understanding correctly, it deal with high cardinality by dropping data, the operators need to monitor for this and adjust their data to lower the cardinality.

VictoriaMetrics

You shouldn't unless you want to use the new open source standard for telemetry. You won't benefit from simplicity or performance improvements. It would be quite the opposite. You can check what is the actual cost of open telemetry adoption here [0]

But if you ever decide to go this path - VictoriaMetrics supports OpenTelemetry protocol for metrics [1]

[0] https://github.com/VictoriaMetrics/VictoriaMetrics/pull/2570

[1] https://docs.victoriametrics.com/Single-server-VictoriaMetri...