Prometheus and OpenTelemetry: Better together

Prometheus and OpenTelemetry (OTel) are open-source tools under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, designed to enhance observability in distributed systems, particularly within Kubernetes environments. Prometheus is widely used for monitoring and alerting, offering a time-series data store and a unique data format, while OTel focuses on the instrumentation aspect by collecting and exporting telemetry data without providing a backend for storage. The article explores the interoperability between these tools, emphasizing how OTel can support Prometheus through components like the OTel Collector's Prometheus Receiver and the Target Allocator (TA), enabling efficient metric collection and service discovery. It also highlights New Relic's integrations, which offer additional security, user management, and data consolidation benefits. The discussion underscores the flexibility of using both systems together, allowing users to convert metrics between Prometheus and OTLP formats to suit organizational needs, and notes the ongoing efforts to enhance compatibility between Prometheus and OTel.