Collect metrics

Here’s an example of how to capture business metrics from a Java application.

// initialize metric
Meter meter = GlobalMetricsProvider.getMeter("my-frontend");
DoubleCounter orderValueCounter = meter.doubleCounterBuilder("order_value").build();

public void createOrder(HttpServletRequest request) {

   // create order in the database
   ...
   // increment business metrics for monitoring
   orderValueCounter.add(orderPrice);
}

See the Open Telemetry Metrics API for more information.

Use Discover to validate that metrics are successfully reported to Kibana.

1. Open your Observability instance.
2. Find Discover in the main menu or use the global search field.
3. If Discover opens in ES|QL mode, switch to classic mode. Then click All logs → Data Views and select APM.
4. Filter the data to only show documents with metrics: processor.name :"metric"
5. Narrow your search with a known OpenTelemetry field. For example, if you have an order_value field, add order_value: * to your search to return only OpenTelemetry metrics documents.

Use Lens to create visualizations for OpenTelemetry metrics. Lens enables you to build visualizations by dragging and dropping data fields. It makes smart visualization suggestions for your data, allowing you to switch between visualization types.

To get started with a new Lens visualization:

1. Go to Visualizations.
2. Click Create new visualization.
3. Select Lens.

For more information on using Lens, refer to the Lens documentation.