What is the difference between an exporter and instrumenting your app directly? [Basic]
Answer
An exporter exposes metrics from an external system or runtime, while direct instrumentation adds metrics inside the application code. Exporters are good for infrastructure and third-party systems; direct instrumentation is better for business and service-level behavior.
Technical explanation
Exporters can show Redis memory, node CPU, or database connection stats, but they cannot know that a checkout failed due to a payment validation rule.
Direct instrumentation captures domain-specific metrics such as orders_created_total, payment_authorization_duration_seconds, and business error classes.
A strong observability design uses both exporter metrics and application metrics.
Hands-on example
Hands-on: use redis_exporter for cache hit ratio and memory fragmentation. Instrument the checkout application directly for checkout_attempts_total, checkout_success_total, and dependency latency. Alert on checkout SLO first, then use Redis exporter metrics for diagnosis.
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