Check your Website for Free using OpenTelemetry

Here's how to perform basic up/down checks of your websites using the OpenTelemetry Collector.

Watch

If you'd prefer to watch rather than read, I have the following content as a YouTube video:

Free Website Checks using OpenTelemetry

Did you know it is possible to use the OpenTelemetry Collector to perform basic HTTP checks of your webpages?

Collector Configuration

It's actually really quite easy. For this blog post I'll assume you're already familiar with the collector and its YAML configuration file (if not, I suggest watching the video above as it has a full end-to-end runthrough with no assumptions).

First, you'll need a collector distribution that includes the httpcheck receiver (the contrib and k8s versions both do).

Here's the magic snippet you need:

receivers:
  httpcheck:
    collection_interval: 10s
    targets:
      - endpoint: http://example.com
        method: GET
      - endpoint: https://agardner.net
        method: GET
      ...
exporters:
  debug:
    verbosity: detailed
  otlphttp:
     endpoint: ...

service:
  pipelines:
    metrics:
      receivers: [httpcheck]
      exporters: [otlphttp, debug etc...]

The collection_interval defines how often the collector will check each endpoint. Note: 10 seconds is far too frequent for production. Probably once a minute is good enough (1m).

That's it, start the collector and as long as you've configured the exporters section correctly for your backend, you should see metrics in your Observability tool. How Green is your Observability? How the OpenTelemetry collector can help