[Docs]: Link to Prometheus official docs for server backend setup

[Wineshuga]

What needs to be changed?

I am an LFX Mentee with Prometheus, working to improve the user experience with documentation on Prometheus and OpenTelemetry Interoperability.

Under Language API and SDKs → [Language] → Exporters, each language section includes instructions for running a Prometheus server backend. This content is already maintained in the official Prometheus documentation on running the Prometheus server and the Prometheus guide for enabling the OTLP Receiver.

I propose replacing the configuration section found in this shared file with a brief description and direct links to the relevant Prometheus documentation.

Why

This keeps the OTel docs in sync with Prometheus without manual maintenance
Prometheus owns this content — users are better served going to the authoritative source.

Example (Python)

Before: A dedicated section on Prometheus server configuration steps.
After:
To run a Prometheus server backend and begin scraping metrics, see the Prometheus getting started guide. To enable the OTLP Receiver, see the Prometheus guide for enabling the OTLP Receiver

Note:

I'm open to feedback on whether any minimal configuration detail should be retained alongside the links, or anything else.

Name + path of the page

content/en/docs/languages/_includes/exporters/prometheus-setup.md — "Prometheus"

Additional context

No response

[tiffany76]

Hi @Wineshuga! Thanks for raising this issue. In general, I agree with you that we should refer to the canonical source for documentation, which in this case are the Prometheus docs. But I wonder what you think about the Docker setup described in the includes file? I don't see those instructions in the Prometheus docs you linked. I'm not sure if there's a reason to recommend Docker over other methods for hosting a Prometheus backend. @ArthurSens, do you know?

[ArthurSens]

Heyyyy, I'm in favor of updating the docs to point to the Prometheus website as the source of truth for how to start and configure Prometheus. I'm also thinking that since this goes to the OTel docs, we might want to mention the Prometheus receiver component in Collector. I don't know very well how to phrase this, but it feels like it should be mentioned somewhere...?

Regarding Docker setup... it is true that using Docker makes things a lot easier, but Docker is not a requirement to run Prometheus, or collector, or any application, to be honest. I'm not sure if we want to make Docker a requirement for folks trying to learn Prometheus and OpenTelemetry integrations.

This part of the docs:

> [!NOTE]
>
> When using Prometheus' OTLP Receiver, make sure that you set the OTLP endpoint
> for metrics in your application to `http://localhost:9090/api/v1/otlp`.
>
> Not all docker environments support `host.docker.internal`. In some cases you
> may need to replace `host.docker.internal` with `localhost` or the IP address
> of your machine.

Goes even deeper into docker internals that are completely unrelated to Prometheus/OTel. It feels more like a distraction to the message we want to share.

[ArthurSens]

Tagging @open-telemetry/prometheus-interoperability here, in case anyone has more opinions about this!

[dashpole]

I agree we should be pointing to the Prometheus documentation and not duplicating it. We should also defer to Prometheus maintainers on what the minimal setup is. If they want to use docker in their getting started guide, they can.

[tiffany76]

Thanks for all the input, folks!

@Wineshuga, please go ahead and raise a PR to modify the includes file as you described. Once the PR is up, we'll be able to give more specific feedback.