How do I send tracing (OpenTelemetry/OpenTracing?) info to Grafana Tempo from a Phoenix api in 2022?

Phoenix Forum Questions / Help
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I’m having a hard time figuring out where to start. I’d like to configure our Phoenix apis to send trace info to Grafana Tempo, so that I can debug issues where multiple APIs/services are calling one another.

But I don’t know where to start investigating, too many questions…

  • Should I research OpenTracing, or OpenTelementry, or something else? There seems to have been a lot of movement in the “monitoring” space the last couple of years.
  • Should I hook into Elixir’s “Telemetry” modules?
  • Is there an Elixir module somewhere that would make sending OpenTrace messages to Grafana Tempo? Or even better, is there an Elixir Grafana library somewhere? (I couldn’t find one).

I don’t need detailed solutions, just some idea of what to start researching.

Thanks in advance!

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I’m using PromEx to expose metrics from my application to Prometheus/Grafana. Very happy with it.

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Thanks @trisolaran. Do you expose traces as well?

If I remember correctly, Prometheus is used to monitor things in Kubernetes, or am I mistaken?

Our code runs on Fargate/ECS, so not sure if PromEx will fit into our system.

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No

Prometheus can be used to monitor any application that exposes an endpoint with prometheus metrics. It doesn’t matter how it’s deployed.

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This one might be helpful:

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~12 mo ago, I was playing with this awesome combo and published my experiments here: GitHub - florinpatrascu/elixir_grafana_loki_tempo: A very simple Elixir demo/project used for experimenting with Grafana Tempo and Loki #opentelemetry #observability #tracing, maybe you can find something useful in it?! hth

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That’s fantastic, thanks so much for posting it.

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Great, thanks everyone, this gives me something to work with :slight_smile: