Local Monitoring Stack with Aspire Dashboard

A complete local monitoring solution with real-time metrics (Aspire Dashboard), historical analysis (Grafana+Mimir), and distributed tracing. Built with OpenTelemetry collector and cloud-native storage.

🚀 Prerequisites

• Docker 23.0+
• Docker Compose 2.20+
• .NET 8.0+ (for instrumented apps)

⚙️ Initial Setup

git clone https://github.com/danielvieiravega/observability-stack.git
cd observability-stack
docker-compose up -d

🌐 Services Overview

Service	Endpoint	Credentials	Purpose
Aspire Dashboard	http://localhost:18888	Open access	Real-time metrics & traces
Grafana	http://localhost:3000	admin/admin	Historical dashboards
Mimir (Prometheus)	http://localhost:9009	-	Metrics storage
MinIO	http://localhost:9001	mimir/supersecret	Persistent storage
OTLP Collector	grpc://localhost:4317	-	Telemetry collection

🔧 Application Instrumentation

Add to .NET Program.cs:

builder.Services
    .AddOpenTelemetry()
    .WithMetrics(metrics =>
    {
        metrics.AddAspNetCoreInstrumentation();
        metrics.AddHttpClientInstrumentation();
        metrics.AddProcessInstrumentation();
        metrics.AddRuntimeInstrumentation();
        metrics.AddOtlpExporter(opts =>
        {
            opts.Endpoint = new Uri("http://localhost:4317");
            opts.Protocol = OpenTelemetry.Exporter.OtlpExportProtocol.Grpc;
        });
    })
    .WithTracing(tracing =>
    {
        tracing.AddAspNetCoreInstrumentation();
        tracing.AddHttpClientInstrumentation();
        tracing.AddEntityFrameworkCoreInstrumentation();
        tracing.AddOtlpExporter(opts =>
        {
            opts.Endpoint = new Uri("http://localhost:4317");
            opts.Protocol = OpenTelemetry.Exporter.OtlpExportProtocol.Grpc;
        });
    })
    .WithLogging(logging =>
    {
        logging.AddOtlpExporter(opts =>
        {
            opts.Endpoint = new Uri("http://localhost:4317");
            opts.Protocol = OpenTelemetry.Exporter.OtlpExportProtocol.Grpc;
        });
    })
    .ConfigureResource(resource =>
    {
        resource
            .AddTelemetrySdk()
            .AddService("OpenTelemetryDemoApi", serviceVersion: "1.0.0")
            .AddOperatingSystemDetector()
            .AddEnvironmentVariableDetector();
    });

See a sample instrumented API for reference.

🛠️ Essential Commands

# Start stack
docker-compose up -d

# View logs
docker-compose logs -f otel-collector

# Full cleanup
docker-compose down -v

📐 Architecture

graph TD
    subgraph App[.NET Application]
        A[Instrumented API] -->|OTLP gRPC| B[Collector]
    end

    subgraph Infra[Monitoring Infrastructure]
        B -->|Metrics| C[Mimir]
        B -->|Metrics/Logs/Traces| D[Aspire]
        C -->|Storage| E[MinIO]
    end

    subgraph Viz[Visualization]
        D -->|Live View| F[Dev]
        G[Grafana] -->|Dashboards| H[Ops]
        G -->|Query| C
    end

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⚠️ Important Notes

• Default credentials are for local use only
• Add TLS for production environments
• Data retention: 7 days (adjust in mimir-config.yaml)