The OpenTelemetry Collector provides an integration with PostgresSQL to ingest metrics. Metrics sent from the PostgreSQL statistics collector are sent to the Collector’s PostgresSQL receiver. From there, the metrics are processed and exported to Lightstep Observability.

To complete the integration, you will:

  • Configure the PostgresSQL receiver for the Collector
  • Enable the integration by adding it to a pipeline

Prerequisites

  • PostgreSQL 9.6 or later.
  • The monitoring user must be granted SELECT on the pg_stat_database.
  • You’ve configured the Collector to export metric data to Lightstep Observability.

Configure the Collector receiver

In the Collector configuration file, add PostgresSQL as a receiver and set the following:

  • endpoint: The address of the PostgresSQL server
  • username: Set to otel
  • password: Password to PostgresSQL
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receivers:
  postgres:
    hosts:
      endpoint: "http://<address of server>:5432"
      username: otel
      password: $POSTGRES_PASSWORD

The OpenTelemetry repo’s readme provides additional details about PostgresSQL configuration.

Enable the Collector receiver

Once the PostgreSQL receiver is configured, enable it by adding it to one or more pipelines as described in the Collector configuration documentation.

Validate metrics are reporting to Lightstep

You can validate that metrics are reporting to Lightstep on the Metrics details page in Project settings.

  1. In Lightstep, click Project settings > Metric details.

  2. Search for PostgreSQL metric names. Search for metric

    See the receiver’s metadata file for a complete list of emitted metrics.

  3. If needed, click on the metric to edit the description and how the units are displayed in Lightstep.

Create a dashboard for the metrics

Use the Lightstep Terraform Provider to create a dashboard for the metrics.

Additional resources

For a more complete example that’s ready to run, see the PostgresSQL integration in Lightstep OpenTelemetry Examples.