Full observability stack with Docker Compose - Python, PHP, Prometheus, Loki, OpenTelemetry and Grafana
1. Resuming: the loose pieces so far Each article in this series has covered one isolated piece: Prometheus + Loki + Grafana in article 1, the Python mini app in article 2, the PHP mini app in article 3, sending logs to Loki in article 4, and trace instrumentation (so far only printed to the console) in article 5. This article brings everything together in a single docker-compose.yml, with one new piece: a collector…
This article brings together all the previously covered components of observability into a single docker-compose.yml file, featuring a new OpenTelemetry collector. The collector receives traces from the mini apps through OTLP and forwards them. In the previous articles, each mini app exported spans directly to the console (ConsoleSpanExporter), but this approach is not how real applications communicate with an observability stack.
The OpenTelemetry Collector simplifies this process by acting as the intermediary. The mini apps continue to export to the same place (the collector via OTLP), while the collector decides where the data goes next, handling tasks like tracing, sampling, attribute enrichment, or multiple destinations simultaneously. Changing the backend becomes a configuration change of the collector, not a redeployment of each instrumented application.
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