Consolidating telemetry from legacy monitoring tools
One of the biggest benefits a good observability solution can provide is low cognitive load when debugging an application and reading through telemetry. Even perfectly correlated and high-quality telemetry is very hard to use if it’s spread across multiple tools and can’t be visualized and analyzed together.
When re-instrumenting legacy services with OpenTelemetry is not an option, we should check whether it’s possible to forward existing data from legacy services to a new observability backend.
As with context propagation, we can be creative and should start by leveraging existing solutions. For example, old .NET systems usually report and consume Windows performance counters and send logs to EventLog, or store them on the hard drive.
The OpenTelemetry Collector provides support for such cases via receivers, available in the contrib repository (at https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector...
