Observability Stack (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Tempo) overview

A full-spectrum observability platform covering metrics, logs, and distributed traces. OpenTelemetry provides vendor-neutral instrumentation SDKs and the OpenTelemetry Collector for receiving, processing, and exporting telemetry data. Prometheus scrapes and stores time-series metrics with PromQL for alerting and dashboarding. Grafana serves as the unified visualization layer, querying across all three signal types. Loki indexes and queries log streams using the same label-based approach as Prometheus, avoiding the cost of full-text indexing. Tempo stores distributed traces with minimal infrastructure overhead via object-storage backends. Go is the dominant language in this ecosystem for building exporters, collectors, and custom instrumentation. This stack replaces commercial APM platforms for teams that want full control over their telemetry pipeline at scale.