Monitor Heroku dynos for comprehensive visibility and troubleshooting.
Heroku is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that abstracts away infrastructure management, allowing developers to focus on their applications.
Heroku's Cedar and Fir runtimes utilize different mechanisms for observability. Fir integrates OpenTelemetry at the platform level, automatically collecting and exporting telemetry via managed Telemetry Drains. In contrast, Cedar requires a manual approach where the application is solely responsible for generating and exporting its own telemetry.
| Feature | Heroku Cedar | Heroku Fir |
|---|---|---|
| Native OTel Support | No. Requires a manual, application-centric setup. | Yes. OpenTelemetry is directly integrated into the platform's core architecture. |
| Telemetry Export | Direct export from an OTel agent or SDK running inside the application's container. | Heroku Telemetry Drains, a managed platform feature that acts as a configurable OTel exporter, which can also be used by application SDKs and agents. |
| Configuration | Manual configuration of OTel environment variables (OTEL_*) and potentially an SDK config file. | A single heroku telemetry:add CLI command to configure the platform-level drain, in addition to any application instrumentation. |
| Automatic Telemetry | None. All telemetry must be generated by the application or its accompanying agent. | Platform signals are collected automatically, including router traces, dyno health metrics, and runtime events. In addition certain runtime metrics like JVM garbage collection are recorded depending on the used buildpack. |
| Contextualization | Manual. Requires enabling the runtime-dyno-metadata labs feature and mapping Heroku environment variables to OTel resource attributes. | Automatic. The platform automatically enriches telemetry with contextual metadata about the application, release, and dyno. |
| Implementation Model | Developer packages, configures, and manages the OTel agent/SDK within the application container. | Developer configures a platform-level Telemetry Drain in additon to the application instrumentation; platform manages the OTel pipeline. |