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monitoring.md

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Monitoring

Many metrics are provided by the Collector for its monitoring. Below some key recommendations for alerting and monitoring are listed. All metrics referenced below are using the --new-metrics option that is enabled by default.

Critical Monitoring

Data Loss

Use rate of otelcol_processor_dropped_spans > 0 and otelcol_processor_dropped_metric_points > 0 to detect data loss, depending on the requirements set up a minimal time window before alerting, avoiding notifications for small losses that are not considered outages or within the desired reliability level.

Low on CPU Resources

This depends on the CPU metrics available on the deployment, eg.: kube_pod_container_resource_limits_cpu_cores for Kubernetes. Let's call it available_cores below. The idea here is to have an upper bound of the number of available cores, and the maximum expected ingestion rate considered safe, let's call it safe_rate, per core. This should trigger increase of resources/ instances (or raise an alert as appropriate) whenever (actual_rate/available_cores) < safe_rate.

The safe_rate depends on the specific configuration being used. // TODO: Provide reference safe_rate for a few selected configurations.

Secondary Monitoring

Queue Length

Most exporters offer a queue/retry mechanism that is recommended as the retry mechanism for the Collector and as such should be used in any production deployment.

TODO: Add metric to monitor queue length.

Currently, the queue/retry mechanism only supports logging for monitoring. Check the logs for messages like "Dropping data because sending_queue is full".

Receive Failures

Sustained rates of otelcol_receiver_refused_spans and otelcol_receiver_refused_metric_points indicate too many errors returned to clients. Depending on the deployment and the client’s resilience this may indicate data loss at the clients.

Sustained rates of otelcol_exporter_send_failed_spans and otelcol_exporter_send_failed_metric_points indicate that the Collector is not able to export data as expected. It doesn't imply data loss per se since there could be retries but a high rate of failures could indicate issues with the network or backend receiving the data.

Data Flow

Data Ingress

The otelcol_receiver_accepted_spans and otelcol_receiver_accepted_metric_points metrics provide information about the data ingested by the Collector.

Data Egress

The otecol_exporter_sent_spans and otelcol_exporter_sent_metric_pointsmetrics provide information about the data exported by the Collector.