4. Tracing Monitoring: Spring Boot 3 -- OpenTelemetry -- Grafana Tempo -- Grafana

In this video, we're going to extend a bit the diagram in the previous video with the appearance of Grafana Tempo. By this you can get some foundation knowledge about Spring Boot 3 Actuator, Micrometer work together, and have some playground to play with OpenTelemetry Connector, Grafana Tempo and Grafana
Github: github.com/nli...
Spring Boot 3 Observability Series: • Spring Boot 3 Observab...
References:
Spring Boot Actuator: docs.spring.io...
Tracing: docs.spring.io...
Grafana Tempo: grafana.com/do...
Grafana Tempo docker-compose sample: github.com/gra...

[@amirkenesbay1615]

Thank u for ur video it was very useful for me)))

[@linhvudev]

thank you so much for your kind word, really appreciate that!

[@marty3089]

I think you can use otlp/tempo as the key in the otel collector config to make the name a bit more explicit

[@linhvudev]

thanks so much for watching this video and raising your suggestion, I very appreciate that. As the time I made this video, 'tempo' wasn't a valid exporter in otel-collector.yml, so I had to use 'otlp' as a key instead. And as you can see in the video, this configuration was copied from the official github of tempo as well. Maybe, now they updated and you can use 'tempo' as a key but I'm not sure.

[@kurtoguz]

Thanks for the series, it's great and has been really helpful for me. I'd like to ask why we use jaeger/zipkin since we get the tracing data to otel-collector and the push them to tempo. So what's the use for jaeger/zipkin here? Is it sth about storing t he tracing data etc.?

[@kurtoguz]

After asking this question I researched a bit and learned that tempo can also store the tracing data. So in case we use Tempo, is zipking/jaeger redundant?

[@linhvudev]

Thanks so much for your interest and nice words! Yeah absolutely right!, basically we only need one 1 tracing backend (Tempo or Zipkin or Jaeger). The thing here is I want to highlight the feature of OtelCollector that we can connect to every kind of tracing backend we want without affecting our codebase (only need to adjust the configuration file of OtelCollector's exporters). And with OtelCollector, we can also send to more than one telemetry backend (for example: your team's Tempo, your client's Zipkin).

[@kurtoguz]

@@linhvudev Actually one more thing confused me. As far as I understand, otel collector is not (and cannot be) protected with an authentication or so. So is there a way to keep others away from sending telemetry/tracing data to our otel collector?

[@linhvudev]

​@@kurtoguz you're looking for this opentelemetry.io/docs/collector/custom-auth/ on receivers