Clarification on the Experimental Status of the OpenTelemetry Prometheus Exporter

[kathy2011]

Hello OpenTelemetry Team,

I am integrating the OpenTelemetry Prometheus Exporter into a Next.js application for enhanced observability via custom metrics. I noticed that the exporter is currently labeled as experimental. Could you provide insights into the following:

• The current stability of the exporter.
• Any known limitations or issues that users should be aware of.
• The anticipated timeline for the exporter to reach stable status.

Your guidance will be instrumental in our decision-making process.

[pichlermarc]

Hi, thanks for reaching out.

• The current stability of the exporter.

The exporter is not stable as indicated by the 0.x version, therefore any minor version may be breaking - in reality though, this happens rarely. One breaking change will happen soon, as we are about to publish @opentelemetry/sdk-metrics@2.0.0 (see #5148) along with @opentelemetry/exporter-prometheus@0.58.0 which will only be compatible with the new version of the metrics SDK.

• Any known limitations or issues that users should be aware of.

There is currently no way to add resources as attributes to metrics. This was implemented recently and will be released at the same time as @opentelemetry/sdk-metrics@2.0.0 is released.

• The anticipated timeline for the exporter to reach stable status.

There are currently no concrete plans to stabilize the Prometheus exporter - as this is the case, I cannot give an estimate. Stabilizing existing components is the top priority (see #5149). However, we will tackle OTLP Exporters first as they're OpenTelemetry's native data format. Then we will work our way through other experimental packages based on how much technical debt we can pay off by stabilizing them. @opentelemetry/exporter-prometheus does not produce significant work elsewhere so I'd expect it to be quite far down the priority queue.