Monitoring Minecraft with OpenTelemetry

The author shares their experience of setting up and monitoring a personal Minecraft server using OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and Dash0, with the aim of creating a reliable multiplayer environment for family fun. They describe the technical process of integrating these monitoring tools, explaining how the OpenTelemetry Java Agent tracks runtime metrics of the Java Virtual Machine, while a Prometheus Exporter collects Minecraft-specific metrics such as player activity and server health. The author opted for a vanilla Minecraft server setup on a Linux VM, utilizing Systemd units to manage server operations and relying on Prometheus's pull-based model to scrape metrics. They highlight the challenges of setting up effective alerting systems using PromQL to notify them of server issues before their family notices, emphasizing the importance of logs over metrics for certain alerts. Despite the technical hurdles, the project served as a satisfying exercise in reviving their Java and Linux sysadmin skills, ultimately prioritizing server uptime over elaborate dashboard setups to focus on enjoying the game.