Self-Observability Dashboard

The OpenTelemetry SDKs can emit their own internal metrics (using the experimental otel.sdk.* semantic conventions) that describe how the SDK is behaving — for example whether a service is dropping telemetry, how long exports take, or whether processor queues are filling up. The demo’s Self-Observability dashboard visualizes these metrics across the span, log, and metric pipelines.

Enabling SDK self-observability

SDK self-observability is opt-in and still experimental, and is enabled through SDK configuration on a per-service basis. In the demo, the ad, fraud-detection, and kafka services opt in. The dashboard is driven by a Service template variable, so any additional service that opts in appears automatically.

Accessing the dashboard

Once the demo is running, open the dashboard directly at http://localhost:8080/grafana/d/self-observability, or navigate to it from the Grafana dashboard list (“Self-Observability”).