Metrics and traces

Ingest metric and trace data

Chronosphere Observability Platform supports two Collectors to ingest metric and trace data, the Chronosphere Collector and the OpenTelemetry Collector. Observability Platform also supports direct metric imports from Google Cloud.

Chronosphere Collector or OpenTelemetry Collector

Your Collector selection depends on the telemetry data you plan to ingest.

Chronosphere recommends using the vendor-supported, optimized, and highly performant Chronosphere Collector for Prometheus discovery and scrape workloads. This use case typically works best with metrics data.

Use the OpenTelemetry Collector if your organization uses OpenTelemetry SDKs for app instrumentation. An added benefit of using the OpenTelemetry Collector is you can configure dynamic, remotely configurable head sampling, which is a powerful control mechanism for managing your tracing costs. Observability Platform supports the OpenTelemetry JaegerRemoteSampler (opens in a new tab) head sampling standard for remotely controlling the sampling configuration of OpenTelemetry SDKs.

Chronosphere CollectorOpenTelemetry Collector
ProprietaryOpen source
Fully supported by Chronosphere SupportExporter configuration support
No remote trace sampling supportRemote trace sampling support

Chronosphere doesn't provide customer support for OpenTelemetry components.

Google Cloud

Observability Platform can import metrics data directly from Google Cloud. Google Cloud metrics map closely to the default Prometheus metrics that Observability Platform uses.

Amazon Web Services

Observability Platform supports receiving CloudWatch metrics through CloudWatch Metrics Streams. You can configure Amazon Web Services (AWS) to continually stream metrics to Observability Platform by configuring CloudWatch Metric Streams, either manually in the AWS Management Console or by using Terraform.