OpenTelemetry

When run as a server and configured accordingly, OPA will emit spans to an OpenTelemetry collector via gRPC.

Each REST API request sent to the server will start a span. If processing the request involves policy evaluation, and that in turn uses http.send, those HTTP clients will emit descendant spans.

Furthermore, spans exported for policy evaluation requests will contain an attribute opa.decision_id of the evaluation’s decision ID if the server has decision logging enabled.

See the configuration documentation for all OpenTelemetry-related configurables.

Prometheus

OPA exposes an HTTP endpoint that can be used to collect performance metrics for all API calls. The Prometheus endpoint is enabled by default when you run OPA as a server.

You can enable metric collection from OPA with the following prometheus.yml config:

global:
  scrape_interval: 15s
scrape_configs:
  - job_name: "opa"
    metrics_path: "/metrics"
    static_configs:
    - targets:
      - "localhost:8181"

The Prometheus endpoint exports Go runtime metrics as well as HTTP request latency metrics for all handlers (e.g., v1/data).

Status Metrics

When Prometheus is enabled in the status plugin (see Configuration), the OPA instance’s Prometheus endpoint also exposes these metrics:

Health Checks

OPA exposes a /health API endpoint that can be used to perform health checks. See Health API for details.

Status API

OPA provides a plugin which can push status to a remote service. See Status API for details.