Hackathon Project: Observability in Robotics and IoT with OpenTelemetry

We’ll explore how to instrument code and visualize telemetry data and logs using OpenTelemetry and the Grafana open-source stack.

Project Ideas

ROS2 Telemetry

• Add OpenTelemetry metrics to a basic ROS2 service tutorial.
• Create a dashboard to show the telemetry in Grafana.

Sensor Monitoring

• Read a sensor (temperature/humidity, ...) from your laptop and instrument it as a metric or log event with OpenTelemetry.
• Create a Grafana dashboard to view the data.

Bring Your Own!

• Add metrics, traces, or logs to an existing C++ (or Python) project and create a dashboard.

Requirements

• Bring a laptop capable of running a Linux-based Docker container and VSCode with the devcontainer extension.
• Pre-install Docker and ensure docker-compose is working.
• A docker-compose file that sets up Grafana, Loki, Mimir, Tempo, and the OpenTelemetry Collector will be provided so you can quickly instrument and visualize your data.

What to Expect

• Hands-on experience with opentelemetry metrics, logs, and traces.
• Collaborative coding to learn how observability helps diagnose and optimize robotics/IoT systems.
• Quick demos where teams share their dashboards and share what you've developed.

Quick Start

• Clone this repository

  git clone https://github.com/dbarker/cmu-africa-hackathon.git

  cd cmu-africa-hackathon

• Open VSCode

  code .

• Open the DevContainer

  Cntr+shift+P

  Dev Containers: Reopen in Container

• Wait for the container to build (requires internet access)

• Open a termainal and build the example

  colcon build

• Run the example

  source install/setup.bash

  ros2 run opentelemetry_ros2_example_cpp simple_process_cpp

• View the logs, metrics, and traces in Grafana

  • Explore Logs
  • Explore Traces
  • Explore Metrics

Helpful References

• OpenTelemetry documentation
• Grafana documentation
• Windows WSL install
• Docker install
• VSCode devcontainer extension install