Blog
Bridging Observability Gaps with MetricsHub & OpenTelemetry
Discover how MetricsHub® leverages OpenTelemetry to bridge the infrastructure monitoring gap between cloud-native and on-prem systems, ensuring uptime and infrastructure reliability.
After years of prioritizing cloud adoption, companies are revisiting on-prem infrastructure to stay ahead in the AI race. While modern observability platforms focus on cloud complexity, they often neglect on-prem systems, which still cause 40% of downtime. OpenTelemetry, though cloud-native by design, can bridge this gap, bringing observability to both cloud apps and on-prem infrastructure.
The Problem with Modern Observability Platforms
Infrastructure monitoring has been a foundational practice since the 1980s. However, as distributed systems emerged around 2010, traditional tools struggled to keep up. Observability platforms stepped in, addressing cloud-native challenges but often overlooking physical servers, storage systems, and network devices. This gap leaves IT teams vulnerable to hardware failures that disrupt uptime and service availability.
But what happens when your infrastructure includes physical servers, storage systems, and network devices? Are they left in the dark? This gap highlights the critical need for tools that unify monitoring across all environments.
OpenTelemetry: The Key to Unified Monitoring
OpenTelemetry, the leading open-source observability framework, solves instrumentation challenges by standardizing data collection and export. Its three keys pillars—metrics, logs, and traces—offer a comprehensive view of system performance, root causes, and request flows. Semantic conventions further ensure consistency, improving compatibility across observability platforms.
For example, before OpenTelemetry’s semantic conventions for hardware metrics, CPU utilization was inconsistently labelled (e.g., cpuUtil, processorUtilization, or ProcessorPercentage). Now, the standard system.cpu.utilization ensures consistency across platforms.
| Without Semconv | With Semconv |
|---|---|
| cpuUtil | system.cpu.utilization (%) |
| processorUtilization | system.cpu.time (s) |
| procTime | |
| prcrPRCRProcessorTimePct | |
| ProcessorPercentage | |
| IdleTime | |
| cpu.time | |
| processor.timeMillis | |
| cpuTotalTime |
Bridging the Gap with MetricsHub®
MetricsHub® is an observability collector designed to detect and predict issues in servers, networks, and storage infrastructure before they impact the availability of services. Built on OpenTelemetry, it seamlessly integrates with leading modern observability platforms like Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, and Splunk.
By adhering strictly to OpenTelemetry’s semantic conventions for hardware metrics, MetricsHub® enables cross-origin dashboards, event correlation, and queries. MetricsHub® also allows organizations to capture and report an extensive range of infrastructure metrics, including:
- Hardware: Disk storage capacity, memory consumption, and CPU usage across platforms.
- Energy & Sustainability: Total power consumption and carbon emissions of data centers.
- Environmental Factors: Server room temperatures and recommendations for optimization.
With MetricsHub, IT teams can unlock the full potential of OpenTelemetry, achieving a unified and actionable view of their infrastructure metrics. This approach paves the way for better performance, sustainability, and efficiency.
MetricsHub® and OpenTelemetry in Action at a Leading Telecom Provider
A major North American telecommunications company leveraged MetricsHub® and OpenTelemetry to monitor 6,000 servers across multiple data centers. By adopting cutting-edge observability standards, such as OpenTelemetry, and integrating solutions like MetricsHub® for seamless metrics collection, Prometheus and Alert Manager for data storage and alerting, Grafana for visualization, and BMC Helix for advanced analysis with AIOps, they built a robust, modern infrastructure monitoring solution.
This transformation led to remarkable results:
- a 70% increase in staff productivity
- improved system uptime
- the prevention of critical data center failures.
MetricsHub® played a pivotal role in streamlining data collection and ensuring smooth integration across their observability stack.
Conclusion
In the race for AI dominance, companies are rediscovering the value of on-prem infrastructure. MetricsHub®, powered by OpenTelemetry, ensures that IT teams can achieve comprehensive observability, unifying cloud-native applications and critical infrastructure. By standardizing metrics collection and enabling seamless integrations, MetricsHub® transforms infrastructure monitoring, paving the way for efficiency, sustainability, and success. Unlike traditional monitoring tools, MetricsHub® ensures seamless integration with modern observability platforms, such as Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, and Splunk, making it the go-to choice for unified monitoring.
Don’t wait for the next outage to take action. Contact us today to see how MetricsHub® can future-proof your infrastructure monitoring!
View MetricsHub® in Action Try MetricsHub® Contact Us