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Monitoring my Minecraft server with OpenTelemetry and Prometheus

dash0.com

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Re: Monitoring my Minecraft server with OpenTelemetry and Prometheus

#31

Post by harrall »

strogonoff wrote: post #7

Monitoring and metric collection makes a lot of sense when you run a production system, or a personal but critical system. Promoting a telemetry solution when it comes to a hobby server, which you host for yourself and which can’t bankrupt you by running up a massive AWS bill, doesn’t seem to make much sense when simply bottling it up in Docker and being able to restart or recreate at will is enough (mount volumes fo…

Setting up telemetry is really easy if you’ve done it before and it’s a learning opportunity if you haven’t.

I have Dockerfiles from 10 years ago for Grafana and a time-series DB so basically you learn it once and you can bang out basic telemetry infra in an hour afterwards.

And I still actually use InfluxDB and Grafana for my hobby stuff. My current Dockerfiles just look like my old ones…

Re: Monitoring my Minecraft server with OpenTelemetry and Prometheus

#32

Post by jeroenhd »

strogonoff wrote: post #7

Monitoring and metric collection makes a lot of sense when you run a production system, or a personal but critical system. Promoting a telemetry solution when it comes to a hobby server, which you host for yourself and which can’t bankrupt you by running up a massive AWS bill, doesn’t seem to make much sense when simply bottling it up in Docker and being able to restart or recreate at will is enough (mount volumes fo…

The goal of this article is to show you how to integrate with this service from just about anything. It's an ad that was fun to make as a hobby project. I doubt the goal was ever to set up a fully integrated Minecraft monitoring pipeline. At best, this is an employee at this company just decided to show the flexibility of their product by integrating with a random piece of kit they like.

Luckily, all of the interesting components are existing third party libraries so if you don't want to use their SaaS service, you can build your own Minecraft dashboard pretty easily.

Re: Monitoring my Minecraft server with OpenTelemetry and Prometheus

#33

Post by treyd »

strogonoff wrote: post #27
doabell wrote: post #21

> I am a man of simple tastes, and running the “vanilla” Minecraft server as a Systemd unit on a Linux VM in the cloud Minecraft is famously under-optimized and needy in terms of CPU frequency. If running a vanilla (no server mods) version, then using something optimized, like PaperMC is a better idea for datacenter VMs. (Until you need to dupe sand or something.) The other route is installing a bunch of optimization…

From my understanding, Paper and the like are good for Minecraft servers focused around specific mini-games (rather than freedorm building), and are the only sensible choice for servers with many people (or not that many people, but really underpowered hardware). However, they may be a problem if players are sensitive to possible non-vanilla behaviour (as you mentioned, and it’s not limited to cheaty duping). Thankfu…

It's kinda nuts. The upstream mojang server binary starts to groan if you have >4-5 players on the same server doing stuff. They've really been dropping the ball on optimization in recent years.

Paper is good enough for anyone but very technical players pushing to the limits of redstone tick timing logic, entity behavior, chunk loading mechanics, etc. These don't matter even for advanced players doing normal things.

Re: Monitoring my Minecraft server with OpenTelemetry and Prometheus

#34

Post by mmanciop »

darknavi wrote: post #30

> Microsoft made things confusing by adding the Bedrock server, which reportedly uses a combination of C, C# and Java, No C# in Bedrock. No Java unless you're talking about the Android versions. Very little C. It's mostly C++.

Thanks for setting me straight :-) I updated the article to reflect that.

Re: Monitoring my Minecraft server with OpenTelemetry and Prometheus

#35

Post by mmanciop »

jeroenhd wrote: post #32
strogonoff wrote: post #7

Monitoring and metric collection makes a lot of sense when you run a production system, or a personal but critical system. Promoting a telemetry solution when it comes to a hobby server, which you host for yourself and which can’t bankrupt you by running up a massive AWS bill, doesn’t seem to make much sense when simply bottling it up in Docker and being able to restart or recreate at will is enough (mount volumes fo…

The goal of this article is to show you how to integrate with this service from just about anything. It's an ad that was fun to make as a hobby project. I doubt the goal was ever to set up a fully integrated Minecraft monitoring pipeline. At best, this is an employee at this company just decided to show the flexibility of their product by integrating with a random piece of kit they like. Luckily, all of the interesti…

I am indeed an employee of Dash0. The setup for telemetry collector will work with anything that accepts OTLP, and with minor adjustments, the data can be sent elsewhere too in other formats, as the OpenTelemetry Collector is very flexible in that regard.

Alerting is specific to Dash0. I know of no other monitoring solution that lets you run real PromQL on logs. But there will be similar ways of accomplishing the same alerting logic.

Re: Monitoring my Minecraft server with OpenTelemetry and Prometheus

#37

Post by mmanciop »

strogonoff wrote: post #7

Monitoring and metric collection makes a lot of sense when you run a production system, or a personal but critical system. Promoting a telemetry solution when it comes to a hobby server, which you host for yourself and which can’t bankrupt you by running up a massive AWS bill, doesn’t seem to make much sense when simply bottling it up in Docker and being able to restart or recreate at will is enough (mount volumes fo…

For this, I have the impression that https://github.com/dirien/minectl might be very close to what you are thinking. I did not try it, but took the Minecraft Exporter from it and used in the setup.

Re: Monitoring my Minecraft server with OpenTelemetry and Prometheus

#38

Post by mmanciop »

strogonoff wrote: post #18
gmuslera wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Implementing proper monitoring in a toy system doesn't prepare you to do it in a massive critical system, but at least you may had learn something in the process, and notice things that in big scale may not be as evident. In any case, fun starts when the system have more interdependent components.

I think there is value in learning which pattern is good to apply in which scenario, and I will argue that in this case the best pattern is “servers are cattle”.

One of the stretch goals for me writing this article was indeed to show between the lines how Prometheus Exporters, the OpenTelemetry Collector and Systemd can all work together. That is a very reusable skill on monitoring workflows running outside containers on Linux VMs or hosts.

Re: Monitoring my Minecraft server with OpenTelemetry and Prometheus

#39

Post by mmanciop »

strogonoff wrote: post #25
dewey wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One persons toil is another persons fun.

And sometimes a person is paid to pretend toil is fun. We are talking about spending hours setting up telemetry instead of playing a game .

I swear I had a lot of fun setting doing the setup.

I am also a massive observability nerd, so YMMV :-)

Re: Monitoring my Minecraft server with OpenTelemetry and Prometheus

#40

Post by mmanciop »

strogonoff wrote: post #28
dewey wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone is into gaming. I rather code on my side projects than use my console. Or people tweak and customize their Linux installation instead of doing work on it. Some people like to work on their cars, driving is a small part of it.

I agree, and I am as guilty of procrastination. However, the author is not really procrastinating—he gets paid for this. Me, I do in fact procrastinate on setting up a Minecraft server infra in the cloud. Maybe that’s precisely why the solution to this problem strikes me as inadequate: > So, the Minecraft server should work reliably and, if it goes down, I should know well before they do How are metrics helpful? Ther…

> How are metrics helpful? There is so much fun that could be had in setting up an actually resilient system instead.

Metrics are the means to an end of alerting. And with alerting, I mean getting pinged on my phone when something important breaks. Like, you know, the server going down.

> Why worry over metrics and alerts when you could orchestrate an infrastructure that grants you the superpower of being able to spin up a server with a copy of the world on a whim instead (or even a system that auto-starts one whenever there is demand)?

As somebody who has run cloud and enterprise software for almost two decades now, I can be that needs monitoring too. The more moving parts there are, the more things go wrong. The more things go wrong, and the more you care they get fixed, the more monitoring you need :-)

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