Using OpenTelemetry and Prometheus: A practical guide to data collection

Grafana Labs, deeply involved in the OpenTelemetry community, has been enhancing the integration between OpenTelemetry and Prometheus, emphasizing interoperability and instrumentation SDKs. This guide highlights best practices for using OpenTelemetry to emit metrics and Prometheus for storage, addressing challenges such as metric normalization, resource attribute management, and naming conventions. Key recommendations include using full metric normalization, copying common resource attributes into metric labels, adhering to semantic conventions, and using seconds as the time unit for compatibility. It advocates for employing the Prometheus Remote Write exporter for efficiency and configuring out-of-order writes to manage data arrival discrepancies. Grafana Labs continues to lead in improving these open-source projects, focusing on further integration and introducing new functionalities like continuous profiling to OpenTelemetry.