3 posts tagged with "opentelemetry"

The OpenTelemetry Collector works out of the box with minimal configuration. You point a receiver at port 4317, wire up an exporter, and telemetry flows. In development, this is sufficient. In production, it is not.

Default settings ship without memory limits, without retry logic, without queue sizing, and without any self-monitoring. The collector will accept data until it runs out of memory, drop data silently when the queue fills up, and give you no signal that anything went wrong. These failures surface as gaps in your dashboards hours or days later, when the context to diagnose them is gone.

This post covers the practical steps to close that gap: hardening the collector's configuration, enabling its built-in diagnostic tools, and diagnosing the failure patterns that show up most often in production.

CI/CD pipelines are critical infrastructure. Builds slow down over weeks, flaky tests waste developer time, and when a pipeline breaks, diagnosing the root cause means clicking through GitHub's UI one run at a time.

The Scout OpenTelemetry CI/CD Action solves this by exporting your GitHub Actions workflow runs as OpenTelemetry traces. Each workflow becomes a trace, each job becomes a child span, and each step becomes a span within its job. You get the same structured observability for your pipelines that you already have for your applications.

Introducing Metric Registry: a live, searchable catalog of 3,700+ observability (and rapidly growing) metrics extracted directly from source repositories across the OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and Kubernetes ecosystems, including cloud provider metrics. Metric Registry is open source and built to stay current automatically as projects evolve.

What you can do today with Metric Registry​

Search across your entire observability stack. Find metrics by name, description, or component, whether you're looking for HTTP-related histograms or database connection metrics.

Understand what metrics actually exist. The registry covers 15 sources including OpenTelemetry Collector receivers, Prometheus exporters (PostgreSQL, Redis, MySQL, MongoDB, Kafka), Kubernetes metrics (kube-state-metrics, cAdvisor), and LLM observability libraries.

See which metrics follow standards. Each metric shows whether it complies with OpenTelemetry Semantic Conventions, helping you understand what's standardized versus custom.

Trace back to the source. Every metric links to its origin: the repository, file path, and commit hash. When you need to understand a metric's exact definition, you can go straight to the source.

Trust the data. Metrics are extracted automatically from source code and official metadata files, and the registry refreshes nightly to stay current as projects evolve.

Can't find what you're looking for? Open an issue or better yet, submit a PR to add new sources or improve existing extractors.

Sources already indexed​