Tools such as Prometheus and OpenTelemetry help us monitor the health, performance, and availability of our complex distributed systems. Both are open source projects under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) umbrella – but what role does each play in observability?
OpenTelemetry (OTel for short), is a vendor-neutral open standard for instrumenting, generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry data. Prometheus is a fixture of the observability landscape, widely relied upon for monitoring and alerting within organizations.

OpenTelemetry's platform is an observability framework, offering insights into distributed tracing, metrics collection, and log management for cloud-native applications. Through documentation, tutorials, and community contributions, OpenTelemetry provides insights into instrumenting applications to monitor performance and troubleshoot issues. Developers and DevOps teams can learn about distributed tracing standards, telemetry data formats, and integration with observability tools to gain visibility into complex distributed systems.

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus and OpenTelemetry (OTel) are key tools for monitoring complex distributed systems. While OTel focuses on instrumentation without offering backend storage, Prometheus provides a time-series data store and a web interface for visualizing metrics. The integration of OTel with Prometheus, particularly in Kubernetes environments, is explored. The OTel Collector’s Prometheus Receiver ingests Prometheus metrics, and the Target Allocator aids in Prometheus service discovery and ensures even distribution of targets among collectors. This setup removes the need for maintaining Prometheus as a data store and provides flexibility in monitoring Kubernetes systems using OTel tools.

Prometheus and OpenTelemetry - Better Together

Additional OTel components for Kubernetes