OpenTelemetry Collector Example - Java Agent with Spring Boot Docker

First we attach the OpenTelemetry Java Agent to a Spring Boot GraphQL Java application. The opentelemetry-javaagent.jar will instrument the java code and frameworks, gather metrics data. This data is then pushed automatically to the collector. HTTP headers ( e.g. for authorization), and additional configuration can be supplied as environment variables.

How to build, setup, configure, and run the OpenTelemetry collector as a docker container?
Then, we configure an OpenTelemetry Collector with an OTEL receiver, attribute and batch processors, along with a logging, and prometheus exporter.

Then lastly, we start a prometheus server, which will scrape the exported metrics, which can be visualised in Grafana.

All services above are run as docker containers with docker-compose.

The health check extension is installed to provide readiness, liveness, and startup probes for Kubernetes and NOMAD environments.

OpenTelemetry Collector

The OpenTelemetry Collector offers a vendor-agnostic implementation of how to receive, process and export telemetry data. It removes the need to run, operate, and maintain multiple agents/collectors. This works with improved scalability and supports open source observability data formats (e.g. Jaeger, Prometheus, Fluent Bit, etc.) sending to one or more open source or commercial back-ends. The local Collector agent is the default location to which instrumentation libraries export their telemetry data.

Thanks for watching
Philip

Example Code: https://github.com/philip-jvm/learn-spring-graphql
Example PR: https://github.com/philip-jvm/learn-spring-graphql/pull/2
OpenTelemetry Collector: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/collector/
OpenTelemetry Collector Github: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector
OpenTelemetry Collector Contrib Github: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib
OpenTelemetry Java Instrumentation (opentelemetry-javaagent.jar): https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-java-instrumentation
OpenTelemetry Docker Image: https://hub.docker.com/r/otel/opentelemetry-collector
Docker Compose: https://docs.docker.com/compose/
Spring Boot: https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/htmlsingle/
Spring for GraphQL: https://spring.io/projects/spring-graphql

0:00 Collector overview, benefits, and use-cases
2:15 Collector components (receivers, processors, exporters)
3:45 Loosely coupled to the observability technology / provider
4:23 Pull based receiver
5:20 Demo overview
6:17 Demo starts. Architecture diagram
7:10 Contributor GitHub repository
8:00 Health extension
9:00 Generate spring boot image with JIB
9:18 Attach the OpenTelemetry Java Agent to the Spring Boot application
12:00 How to configure the collector
16:00 Starting prometheus, and grafana containers
18:00 Run the containers, generate metrics
19:45 Open Grafana and create dashboards with the metrics