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The OpenTelemetry Collector sits at the center of the OpenTelemetry architecture but is unrelated to the W3C Trace Context. In my tracing demo, I use Jaeger instead of the Collector. Yet, it's ubiquitous, as in every OpenTelemetry-related post. I wanted to explore it further.
Prometheus is one of the primary monitoring solutions. It works on a pull-based model: Prometheus scrapes compatible endpoints of your application(s) and stores them internally.
We will use the OTEL Collector to scrape a Prometheus-compatible endpoint and print out the result in the console. Grafana Labs offers a project that generates random metrics to play with. For simplicity's sake, I'll use Docker Compose; the setup looks like the following:
The complete source code for this post can be found on GitHub.
OpenTelemetry Operators
The above is an excellent first step, but there's more than printing to the console. We will expose the metrics to be scraped by a regular Prometheus instance; we can add a Grafana dashboard to visualize them. While it may seem pointless, bear with it, as it's only a stepstone.