o11yfest

Building OpenMetrics Exporter

Openmetrics-exporter (OME) is an Observability-as-Code software that metrics what Terraform is to Cloud Operations. OME uses HCL configs written in HCL syntax to connect to cloud-native sources and collate metrics using simple pipes, absorbing all challenges of distributed systems underneath.

Openmetrics-exporter, or OME, is an Observability-as-Code framework that reduces the toil of finding-and-combining useful metrics from layers and hundreds of components involved in modern cloud-native systems. Every source, component, or metric is just a simple configuration file because the only “code” you should focus on is for your customers.

It leverages plugin architecture to support data sources. It relies heavily on data frame processing to combine metrics from various metrics sources before they are all converted into Openmetrics format, ready to be piped out by a Prometheus. Traditionally, such correlation and post-processing have been a responsibility of additional Data Pipelines but with OME it’s as simple as writing a configuration file. At the core of it, OME uses Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL) to build a DSL that can allow declarative input to build metric Pipelines.

The talk is largely about what can you solve using OME. But it also takes a very short journey of ““behind-the-scenes””

The need to build Openmetrics-exporter, picking a configuration language that was easily editable by humans, building a DSL around it, and more importantly leveraging Golang for Data Science needs.