How These Tools Work Together

When used together, these tools provide a comprehensive monitoring and observability solution:

OpenTelemetry:

• Instrument your .NET Core application to generate traces, metrics, and logs.
• Export the telemetry data to Prometheus (metrics) or other systems.

Prometheus:

• Collects metrics from your app (via OpenTelemetry) and system (via NodeExporter).
• Stores metrics in a time-series database for querying and alerting.

NodeExporter:

• Provides hardware and OS-level metrics (e.g., CPU and memory) to Prometheus.

Grafana:

• Connects to Prometheus to visualize metrics in dashboards.
• Displays traces and logs from OpenTelemetry if configured with other backends (e.g., Jaeger, Loki).

Example Workflow

• NodeExporter exposes server metrics (CPU, memory, etc.).
• Prometheus scrapes metrics from NodeExporter and your application (instrumented with OpenTelemetry).
• OpenTelemetry provides app-level telemetry data (traces, metrics, and logs).
• Grafana visualizes all collected data in custom dashboards for real-time monitoring and alerting.

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