Write OTLP metrics by using an OpenTelemetry sidecar

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This tutorial shows how to write, deploy, and call a Cloud Run service that reports custom OTLP metrics to Google Cloud Managed Service For Prometheus by using the OpenTelemetry sidecar.

If you have a Cloud Run service that reports Prometheus metrics, then use the Prometheus sidecar for Cloud Run instead.

Objectives

• Write, build, and deploy a service to Cloud Run with the OpenTelemetry sidecar.
• Generate custom metrics and report them to Google Cloud Managed Service For Prometheus.

Costs

In this document, you use the following billable components of Google Cloud:

• Cloud Build
• Artifact Registry
• Google Cloud Managed Service For Prometheus
• Cloud Run

To generate a cost estimate based on your projected usage, use the pricing calculator. New Google Cloud users might be eligible for a free trial.

Before you begin

1. Sign in to your Google Cloud account. If you're new to Google Cloud, create an account to evaluate how our products perform in real-world scenarios. New customers also get $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads.

2. In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

   Note: If you don't plan to keep the resources that you create in this procedure, create a project instead of selecting an existing project. After you finish these steps, you can delete the project, removing all resources associated with the project.

   Go to project selector

3. Make sure that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

4. In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

   Note: If you don't plan to keep the resources that you create in this procedure, create a project instead of selecting an existing project. After you finish these steps, you can delete the project, removing all resources associated with the project.

   Go to project selector

5. Make sure that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

6. Enable the Cloud Run, Cloud Monitoring, Artifact Registry, and Cloud Build APIs.

   Enable the APIs

7. Install and initialize the gcloud CLI.
8. Update Google Cloud CLI: gcloud components update

Required roles

To get the permissions that you need to complete the tutorial, ask your administrator to grant you the following IAM roles on your project:

• Cloud Build Editor (roles/cloudbuild.builds.editor)
• Cloud Run Admin (roles/run.admin)
• Create Service Accounts (roles/iam.serviceAccountCreator)
• Project IAM Admin (roles/resourcemanager.projectIamAdmin)
• Monitoring Metric Writer (roles/monitoring.metricWriter)
• Service Account User (roles/iam.serviceAccountUser)
• Service Usage Consumer (roles/serviceusage.serviceUsageConsumer)
• Storage Admin (roles/storage.admin)

For more information about granting roles, see Manage access to projects, folders, and organizations.

You might also be able to get the required permissions through custom roles or other predefined roles.

Note: IAM basic roles might also contain permissions to complete the tutorial. You shouldn't grant basic roles in a production environment, but you can grant them in a development or test environment.

Also note that the Cloud Run service identity needs the Monitoring Metric Writer (roles/monitoring.metricWriter) role. The Compute Engine default service account might have this role by default, but you might need to add it if you have changed its permissions or are using a different service account.

Setting up gcloud defaults

To configure gcloud with defaults for your Cloud Run service:

1. Set your default project:

   gcloud config set project PROJECT_ID

   Replace PROJECT_ID with the name of the project you created for this tutorial.

2. Configure gcloud for your chosen region:

   gcloud config set run/region REGION

   Replace REGION with the supported Cloud Run region of your choice.

Cloud Run locations

Cloud Run is regional, which means the infrastructure that runs your Cloud Run services is located in a specific region and is managed by Google to be redundantly available across all the zones within that region.

Meeting your latency, availability, or durability requirements are primary factors for selecting the region where your Cloud Run services are run. You can generally select the region nearest to your users but you should consider the location of the other Google Cloud products that are used by your Cloud Run service. Using Google Cloud products together across multiple locations can affect your service's latency as well as cost.

Cloud Run is available in the following regions:

Subject to Tier 1 pricing

• asia-east1 (Taiwan)
• asia-northeast1 (Tokyo)
• asia-northeast2 (Osaka)
• asia-south1 (Mumbai, India)
• europe-north1 (Finland) Low CO₂
• europe-southwest1 (Madrid) Low CO₂
• europe-west1 (Belgium) Low CO₂
• europe-west4 (Netherlands) Low CO₂
• europe-west8 (Milan)
• europe-west9 (Paris) Low CO₂
• me-west1 (Tel Aviv)
• us-central1 (Iowa) Low CO₂
• us-east1 (South Carolina)
• us-east4 (Northern Virginia)
• us-east5 (Columbus)
• us-south1 (Dallas) Low CO₂
• us-west1 (Oregon) Low CO₂

Subject to Tier 2 pricing

• africa-south1 (Johannesburg)
• asia-east2 (Hong Kong)
• asia-northeast3 (Seoul, South Korea)
• asia-southeast1 (Singapore)
• asia-southeast2 (Jakarta)
• asia-south2 (Delhi, India)
• australia-southeast1 (Sydney)
• australia-southeast2 (Melbourne)
• europe-central2 (Warsaw, Poland)
• europe-west10 (Berlin) Low CO₂
• europe-west12 (Turin)
• europe-west2 (London, UK) Low CO₂
• europe-west3 (Frankfurt, Germany) Low CO₂
• europe-west6 (Zurich, Switzerland) Low CO₂
• me-central1 (Doha)
• me-central2 (Dammam)
• northamerica-northeast1 (Montreal) Low CO₂
• northamerica-northeast2 (Toronto) Low CO₂
• southamerica-east1 (Sao Paulo, Brazil) Low CO₂
• southamerica-west1 (Santiago, Chile) Low CO₂
• us-west2 (Los Angeles)
• us-west3 (Salt Lake City)
• us-west4 (Las Vegas)

If you already created a Cloud Run service, you can view the region in the Cloud Run dashboard in the Google Cloud console.

OK

Creating a Artifact Registry image repository

Create an Artifact Registry Docker repository to host the sample service image:

gcloud artifacts repositories create run-otel \
    --repository-format=docker \
    --location=REGION \
    --project=PROJECT_ID

Replace the following:

• PROJECT_ID with the name of the project you created for this tutorial.
• REGION REGION with the supported Cloud Run region of your choice.

Retrieving the code sample

To retrieve the code sample for use:

1. Clone the sample app repository to your local machine:

   Go

   git clone https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/golang-samples.git

   Alternatively, you can download the sample as a zip file and extract it.

2. Change to the directory that contains the Cloud Run sample code:

   Go

   cd golang-samples/run/custom-metrics/

Reviewing the code

The code for this tutorial consists of the following:

• A server that handles incoming requests and generates a metric named sidecar_sample_counter.

package main

import (
	"context"
	"fmt"
	"log"
	"net/http"
	"os"

	"go.opentelemetry.io/otel/exporters/otlp/otlpmetric/otlpmetricgrpc"
	"go.opentelemetry.io/otel/metric"
	sdkmetric "go.opentelemetry.io/otel/sdk/metric"
	"go.opentelemetry.io/otel/sdk/resource"
	semconv "go.opentelemetry.io/otel/semconv/v1.24.0"
)

var counter metric.Int64Counter

func main() {
	ctx := context.Background()
	shutdown := setupCounter(ctx)
	defer shutdown(ctx)

	port := os.Getenv("PORT")
	if port == "" {
		port = "8080"
		log.Printf("defaulting to port %s", port)
	}

	http.HandleFunc("/", handler)
	log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(":"+port, nil))
}

func handler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
	counter.Add(context.Background(), 100)
	fmt.Fprintln(w, "Incremented sidecar_sample_counter metric!")
}

func setupCounter(ctx context.Context) func(context.Context) error {
	serviceName := os.Getenv("K_SERVICE")
	if serviceName == "" {
		serviceName = "sample-cloud-run-app"
	}
	r, err := resource.Merge(
		resource.Default(),
		resource.NewWithAttributes(
			semconv.SchemaURL,
			semconv.ServiceName(serviceName),
		),
	)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("Error creating resource: %v", err)
	}

	exporter, err := otlpmetricgrpc.New(ctx,
		otlpmetricgrpc.WithInsecure(),
	)
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("Error creating exporter: %s", err)
	}
	provider := sdkmetric.NewMeterProvider(
		sdkmetric.WithReader(sdkmetric.NewPeriodicReader(exporter)),
		sdkmetric.WithResource(r),
	)

	meter := provider.Meter("example.com/metrics")
	counter, err = meter.Int64Counter("sidecar-sample-counter")
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("Error creating counter: %s", err)
	}
	return provider.Shutdown
}

• A Dockerfile that defines the operating environment for the service.

FROM golang:1.21 as builder
WORKDIR /app
COPY . .
RUN CGO_ENABLED=0 GOOS=linux go build -o sample-app

FROM alpine:3
RUN apk add --no-cache ca-certificates
COPY --from=builder /app/sample-app /sample-app
CMD ["/sample-app"]

The sample also includes files under the collector subdirectory for building a custom OpenTelemetry Collector:

• A config file for the OpenTelemetry Collector.

  receivers:
    otlp:
      protocols:
        grpc:
        http:
  
  processors:
    batch:
      # batch metrics before sending to reduce API usage
      send_batch_max_size: 200
      send_batch_size: 200
      timeout: 5s
  
    memory_limiter:
      # drop metrics if memory usage gets too high
      check_interval: 1s
      limit_percentage: 65
      spike_limit_percentage: 20
  
    # automatically detect Cloud Run resource metadata                                                                                                                                               
    resourcedetection:
      detectors: [env, gcp]
      timeout: 2s
      override: false
  
    resource:
      attributes:
        # add instance_id as a resource attribute                                                                                                                                                    
      - key: service.instance.id
        from_attribute: faas.id
        action: upsert
        # parse service name from K_SERVICE Cloud Run variable                                                                                                                                       
      - key: service.name
        value: ${env:K_SERVICE}
        action: insert
  
  exporters:
    googlemanagedprometheus: # Note: this is intentionally left blank   
  
  extensions:
    health_check:
  
  service:
    extensions: [health_check]
    pipelines:
      metrics:
        receivers: [otlp]
        processors: [batch, memory_limiter, resourcedetection, resource]
        exporters: [googlemanagedprometheus]

• A Dockerfile that bundles the provided config into an upstream Collector image.

  FROM otel/opentelemetry-collector-contrib:0.101.0
  
  COPY collector-config.yaml /etc/otelcol-contrib/config.yaml

Shipping the code

Shipping code consists of three steps: building a container image with Cloud Build, uploading the container image to Artifact Registry, and deploying the container image to Cloud Run.

To ship your code:

1. Build your sample service container and publish on Artifact Registry:

   gcloud builds submit --tag REGION-docker.pkg.dev/PROJECT_ID/run-otel/sample-metrics-app

   Upon success, you should see a SUCCESS message containing the ID, creation time, and image name. The image is stored in Artifact Registry and can be re-used if desired.

2. Build your Collector container and publish on Artifact Registry:

   gcloud builds submit collector --tag REGION-docker.pkg.dev/PROJECT_ID/run-otel/otel-collector-metrics

   Upon success, you should see a SUCCESS message containing the ID, creation time, and image name. The image is stored in Artifact Registry and can be re-used if desired.

3. Deploy your application:

   YAML

   1. Create a new file called service.yaml with the following:

      apiVersion: serving.knative.dev/v1
      kind: Service
      metadata:
        name: SERVICE-NAME
        annotations:
          run.googleapis.com/launch-stage: BETA
      spec:
        template:
          metadata:
            annotations:
              run.googleapis.com/container-dependencies: "{app:[collector]}"
          spec:
            containers:
            - image: REGION-docker.pkg.dev/PROJECT_ID/run-otel/sample-metrics-app
              name: app
              ports:
              - containerPort: CONTAINER_PORT
              env:
              - name: "OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT"
                value: "http://localhost:4317"
            - image: REGION-docker.pkg.dev/PROJECT_ID/run-otel/otel-collector-metrics
              name: collector
              startupProbe:
                httpGet:
                  path: /
                  port: 13133
      

   2. Replace the following:
      • CONTAINER_PORT with the port your service's ingress container listens on. By default, this is 8080.
      • SERVICE-NAME with any name for your service, such as custom-metrics-sample-service.

4. Create the new service with the following command:

   gcloud run services replace service.yaml

   This command returns a service URL. Use this URL to try out the sample application in Trying it out.

Trying it out

Using the URL from the gcloud run command in Shipping the code, connect to the service to generate some sample metrics (you can run this command several times to generate more interesting data):

curl -H \
"Authorization: Bearer $(gcloud auth print-identity-token)" \
SERVICE_URL

Replace SERVICE_URL with the URL of your service.

Next, navigate to the Metrics Explorer within the Cloud Monitoring section of the Google Cloud console and select the sidecar_sample_counter metric.

You can also query the metrics with PromQL. For example, the query below will filter metrics based on the Cloud Run instance ID:

sidecar_sample_counter{instance="INSTANCE_ID"}

Replace INSTANCE_ID with the ID of any instance for your service (available in the instance logs or from the metadata server).

This query produces a chart like the one below:

Clean up

If you created a new project for this tutorial, delete the project. If you used an existing project and wish to keep it without the changes added in this tutorial, delete resources created for the tutorial.

Deleting the project

The easiest way to eliminate billing is to delete the project that you created for the tutorial.

To delete the project:

Caution: Deleting a project has the following effects:

• Everything in the project is deleted. If you used an existing project for the tasks in this document, when you delete it, you also delete any other work you've done in the project.
• Custom project IDs are lost. When you created this project, you might have created a custom project ID that you want to use in the future. To preserve the URLs that use the project ID, such as an appspot.com URL, delete selected resources inside the project instead of deleting the whole project.

If you plan to explore multiple architectures, tutorials, or quickstarts, reusing projects can help you avoid exceeding project quota limits.

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Manage resources page.

   Go to Manage resources

2. In the project list, select the project that you want to delete, and then click Delete.
3. In the dialog, type the project ID, and then click Shut down to delete the project.

Deleting tutorial resources

1. Delete the Cloud Run service you deployed in this tutorial:

   gcloud run services delete SERVICE-NAME

   Where SERVICE-NAME is your chosen service name.

   You can also delete Cloud Run services from the Google Cloud console.

2. Remove the gcloud default region configuration you added during tutorial setup:

    gcloud config unset run/region
   

3. Remove the project configuration:

    gcloud config unset project
   

4. Delete other Google Cloud resources created in this tutorial:

   • Delete the Artifact Registry Docker repository

What's next

More examples, including examples for traces and logs, are available on GitHub.