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2 posts tagged with "otel-collector"

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Stop Deploying Broken OTel Configs: Validate & Test Before You Ship

· 10 min read
Nitin Misra
Engineer at base14

OpenTelemetry Collector configurations are YAML files. There's no schema, no type system, and no IDE that will tell you that tail_smapling isn't a real processor. You find out when your pipeline goes dark and someone starts paging the on-call.

The collector ships with otelcol validate, which catches syntax errors and fails on unknown component types. That covers a slice of the problem. It won't tell you that your send_batch_max_size is smaller than your send_batch_size, that your memory limiter is effectively disabled, or that you've hardcoded an API key in plain text.

Live Metric Registry: find and understand observability metrics across your stack

· 9 min read
Ranjan Sakalley
Founder & CPO at base14

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

CategorySources
OpenTelemetryCollector Contrib, Semantic Conventions, Python, Java, JavaScript
Prometheusnode_exporter, postgres_exporter, redis_exporter, mysql_exporter, mongodb_exporter, kafka_exporter
Kuberneteskube-state-metrics, cAdvisor
LLM ObservabilityOpenLLMetry, OpenLIT
CloudWatchRDS, ALB, DynamoDB, Lambda, EC2, S3, SQS, API Gateway