Building a high-volume metrics pipeline with OpenTelemetry and vmagent

This blog post discusses a production-tested method for migrating a high-volume metrics pipeline from StatsD to OpenTelemetry and Prometheus. It details the challenges faced during the migration, the benefits of using the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP), the implementation of a dual-write approach, and the introduction of a centralized streaming aggregation pipeline using vmagent. The authors share operational insights and techniques to overcome performance issues, specifically in handling high cardinality metrics, and introduce a 'zero injection' method to correct counting errors during the data transition.