# OpenTelemetry Astronomy Shop Demo App with OpenObserve Integration

> Deploy the OpenTelemetry Astronomy Shop demo and stream traces, metrics, and logs to OpenObserve with Helm. Easily configure OTLP and visualize everything in dashboards.

Source: https://openobserve.ai/blog/opentelemetry-astronomy-shop-demo/
Published: 2025-10-13
Authors: Chaitanya Sistla
Category: Engineering
Tags: OpenTelemetry, Tracing, Logging, Observability, OpenObserve

---

Want to explore OpenTelemetry with a real-world example? The OpenTelemetry Astronomy Shop demo is a microservices-based application that generates traces, metrics, and logs \- perfect for learning observability concepts. We’ll cover how to set it up and ingest all that telemetry data into OpenObserve.

## What You'll Build

This guide walks you through deploying the OpenTelemetry demo application and configuring it to send observability data to OpenObserve, giving you a complete view of your distributed system's performance.

## Prerequisites

1. <a href="https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-demo" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">OpenTelemetry Astronomy Shop demo</a>
2. <a href="https://open-telemetry.github.io/opentelemetry-helm-charts" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">OpenTelemetry Helm Chart</a>
3. [OpenObserve Cloud](https://cloud.openobserve.ai/) or [self-hosted instance](https://openobserve.ai/downloads/)

## Setup Steps

### Step 1: Clone the Demo Repository

```shell
git clone https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-demo.git
```

### Step 2: Add the OpenTelemetry Helm Repository

```shell
helm repo add open-telemetry https://open-telemetry.github.io/opentelemetry-helm-charts
```

### Step 3: Configure OpenObserve Integration

Create a `values.yml` file with your OpenObserve-specific configuration. This tells the OpenTelemetry Collector where to send your data:

```
opentelemetry-collector:
  config:
    exporters:
      otlphttp/openobserve:
        endpoint: https://example.openobserve.ai/api/default/
        headers:
          Authorization: Basic TOKEN
          stream-name: otel-demo

    service:
      pipelines:
        traces:
          exporters: [otlp, debug, spanmetrics, otlphttp/openobserve]
        metrics:
          exporters: [otlphttp/openobserve]
        logs:
          exporters: [otlphttp/openobserve]
```

Replace `example.openobserve.ai` with your OpenObserve instance URL and `TOKEN` with your authentication token. You can find these configuration details in OpenObserve under **DataSources \> Custom \> Logs/Metrics/Traces \> OTEL Collector**.

![Adding an authentication token](/assets/otel_demo_adding_authentication_token_bf5063c98b.png)

### Step 4: Deploy with Helm

```shell
helm install otel-demo open-telemetry/opentelemetry-demo --values my-values.yml
```

### Step 5: Visualize in OpenObserve

Once deployed, head over to your OpenObserve dashboard. You'll see traces, metrics, and logs from the Astronomy Shop flowing in, ready to explore and analyze.

- Errors-only filter for Traces: Quickly isolate and inspect failed transactions by filtering traces with errors, helping you focus on problematic service paths.

![Error-only filter for Traces](/assets/otel_demo_error_filter_filter_for_traces_eb82acf425.png)

- Viewing all the traces: Explore all recorded traces in one place to get a high-level overview of request flows, system activity, and key RED metrics (Requests, Errors, Duration).

![Viewing all Traces along with RED metrics](/assets/otel_demo_viewing_all_traces_with_red_metrics_a1098ef930.png)

- Viewing all the spans of a Trace: Drill down into individual spans within a trace to understand how different microservices and components interacted during a request.

![Viewing all spans of a Trace](/assets/otel_demo_viewing_all_spans_of_a_trace_505162145a.png)

- Service map of entire microservices: Visualize service dependencies and call relationships across the Astronomy Shop, helping you see how components connect and communicate.

![Trace Service Map of microservices](/assets/otel_demo_trace_service_map_of_microservices_c0130d4915.png)

- Trace timeline for the Traces: Analyze request durations with a timeline view that shows latency contributions from each span in the trace.

![Timeline view of the Traces](/assets/otel_demo_timeline_view_of_the_traces_6f4480b3cc.png)

- Viewing attributes and learning more about the transaction: Inspect key attributes such as user IDs, service names, and request methods to get rich context about each transaction.

![Viewing attributes related to a transaction](/assets/otel_demo_viewing_attributes_related_to_a_transaction_0bdd284cb2.png)

- Exploring events and exceptions: Dive into exception details and error events emitted by spans to pinpoint the root cause of failures.

![Events and Exceptions for exploring root cause of failure](/assets/otel_demo_events_and_exceptions_for_exploring_root_cause_of_failure_7f95036e34.png)

- Correlate Traces with Logs: Pivot from a trace to its associated logs, providing a full picture of what happened during a transaction.

![Correlate Traces with Logs](/assets/otel_demo_correlate_traces_with_logs_9fcede5487.png)

- Logs with selected TraceID: Filter logs by `TraceID` to view log entries that belong to the same transaction, perfect for debugging distributed requests.

![Filtering based on a traceid](/assets/otel_demo_filtering_based_on_a_traceid_b82cbf0212.png)

## What's Next?

With your demo running, you can experiment with different observability scenarios, create custom [dashboards](https://openobserve.ai/docs/user-guide/analytics/dashboards/), set up [alerts](https://openobserve.ai/docs/user-guide/analytics/alerts/), and get hands-on experience with [distributed tracing](https://openobserve.ai/docs/features/distributed-tracing/). The Astronomy Shop generates realistic traffic patterns across multiple microservices, making it an excellent playground for learning OpenTelemetry and OpenObserve.

## Additional Resources

Learn more about [Openobserve and OpenTelemetry](https://openobserve.ai/opentelemetry/) and explore our other OTel blogs, including:

- [Simplifying Kubernetes Monitoring with OpenTelemetry and OpenObserve](https://openobserve.ai/blog/monitoring-kubernetes-with-opentelemetry/)
- [Implementing OpenTelemetry Logging in .NET Applications](https://openobserve.ai/blog/opentelemetry-logging-in-dotnet-applications/)
- [Distributed Tracing in Node.js Applications with OpenTelemetry](https://openobserve.ai/blog/distributed-tracing-in-nodejs-with-opentelemetry/)

Happy observing\!