PromCon EU 2025Talk abstract
Debugging the Pipeline: Observability for Your Observability with OTel + Prometheus
So you've set up OpenTelemetry and Prometheus to observe your systems—but what happens when they start misbehaving? Collectors stop scraping, Target Allocators go AWOL, and metrics go missing just when you need them most. In this talk, we’ll go a layer deeper: how do you observe your observability stack? We'll walk through how to monitor and debug the OTel Collector pipeline using Prometheus itself, from understanding pipeline health signals to catching misconfigurations and performance bottlenecks. We’ll also cover Target Allocator quirks, Prometheus remote write issues, and how to set up practical alerts (before your SREs do it for you). This is a hands-on, practical talk for folks running Prometheus + OTel in production or considering the combo. Come for the meta observability, stay for the real-world war stories and dashboards.
Speakers
