Why MetricsHub® is built-on OpenTelemetry

A Few Words About the Team behind MetricsHub®

In 2023, Bertrand Martin, co-founder and CEO of Sentry Software, launched MetricsHub®, a new initiative rooted in two decades of experience in IT infrastructure monitoring. To bring this vision to life, he assembled a team of passionate developers from Sentry Software with deep expertise in the field. Since 2004, the Sentry Software’s team has been designing and delivering monitoring solutions for BMC Software.

However, like many mature solutions, Sentry Software’s earlier tools were built on a legacy tech stack and written in a proprietary language, factors that increasingly limited their compatibility with today’s modern observability platforms. It became clear that a modern, open, and future-proof solution was needed. That solution is MetricsHub®.

Aiming for Better Compatibility with Modern Observability Platforms

At the heart of the project was a clear objective: to provide a unified solution capable of collecting metrics from every critical component of the IT infrastructure (servers, storage systems, network switches, databases, and more) and forwarding that data to any observability backend.

Interoperability and compatibility quickly became the team’s guiding principles. To fulfill this ambition, they needed to rely on open, widely adopted frameworks. Open source was the obvious path forward. The team began exploring their options, with a strong focus on OpenTelemetry (OTel) and its Collector.

Getting to Grips with OpenTelemetry Collector

The OpenTelemetry Collector is a vendor-agnostic proxy that ingests telemetry data in various formats, applies filters and transformations, and exports it to one or multiple back-ends. It is built around three key components:

• Receivers, which ingest data into the collector.
• Processors, which define how the data is handled. These processors help improve availability and performance by minimizing outgoing connections and preventing memory overflows.
• Exporters, which specify where the processed data is sent. They allow exporting metrics from an instrumented application to another third-party system such as Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, or Splunk.

The OpenTelemetry Collector empowers users with complete control over how telemetry data is collected and exported. With tools, APIs, and SDKs available for most programming languages, OpenTelemetry ensures seamless interoperability across diverse languages and environments.

Its open and extensible architecture makes it possible to route data simultaneously to multiple destinations, including BMC Helix, Datadog, Grafana, Prometheus, New Relic, Splunk, and many more. Backed by a vibrant, fast-growing community, the project benefits from continuous contributions that expand its capabilities.

With such flexibility, scalability, and community momentum, it’s no surprise that OpenTelemetry has become the second most active project within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), right after Kubernetes.

Embracing the OpenTelemetry Revolution

At the end of the research phase, the entire team aligned on OpenTelemetry as the foundational framework for MetricsHub. After investing time in learning and mastering its principles, the team created a custom distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector tailored to their specific needs. Inspired by the energy of the open-source community, the team felt a strong desire to contribute in return. Drawing on their deep expertise in hardware monitoring, they helped shape the semantic conventions for hardware metrics. After submitting an initial version, they gathered feedback, iterated, refined their proposal, offering a final version they hope will gain broad consensus within the OpenTelemetry ecosystem.

To bring IT infrastructure monitoring into the OpenTelemetry landscape, MetricsHub needed to rely on the hardware connector library developed and refined over the past 20 years. Originally written in a proprietary language, this library powered data collection across a wide range of hardware, including servers, storage systems, and network switches. To modernize it and ensure compatibility, the team undertook the major task of translating more than 250 connectors into Java.

A New Product is Born: MetricsHub®

After months of intensive development, the team proudly unveiled MetricsHub®, a next generation monitoring solution built for modern observability platforms.

The initial release focused on enabling seamless metric export to Prometheus, laying the groundwork for robust integration with popular observability back-ends. To complement this, the team developed custom Grafana dashboards that transform raw telemetry into actionable insights. These dashboards not only highlight hardware issues across monitored systems but also provide visibility into electricity consumption and CO₂ emissions, helping organizations monitor both performance and environmental impact.

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