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Monitoring my Minecraft server with OpenTelemetry and Prometheus

One of the secret pleasures of life is to be paid for things you would do for free. On a completely unrelated note, this blog post documents my time figuring out how to monitor a Minecraft server with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus and Dash0.

Microsoft made things confusing by adding the Bedrock server, which reportedly uses a combination of C, C# and Java, and is different in terms of gameplay from vanilla in subtle ways. And finally, the one I went with: the Minecraft Prometheus Exporter by Engin Diri, which ticked for me all the boxes: written in Go, easy to download from the GitHub releases pages, and has a lot of cool telemetry. While there is a systemdreceiverCopy in the OpenTelemetry Collector, when I looked into its code hoping to see a metric reporting data on Systemd units, and specifically the status (which would have been perfect for my alert rule), I was surprised to find out that the receiver seems to do precisely nothing.

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