Trace Bullet

Instrument your Minecraft server with OpenTelemetry and export real-time metrics to any OTLP-compatible observability platform.

What It Does

TraceBullet runs alongside your server and continuously collects performance and gameplay metrics, exporting them via OTLP so you can visualize trends, set up alerts, and catch problems before your players notice.

Metrics Collected

| Metric | Description |
|—|—|
| TPS | Tick time histogram — see how your server performs across the full distribution, not just the average |
| Player Count | Online player count over time |
| Chunk Count | Loaded chunk count per dimension |
| Entity Count | Entity count per dimension |
| World Save Duration | Histogram of how long each world save takes per dimension |
| Scheduled Tick Queue | Pending block and fluid tick queue size per dimension — a leading indicator of lag |
| Chunk Generation | Count of newly generated chunks per dimension, distinguishing expensive generation from cheap disk loads |

Setup

1. Drop the mod JAR into your mods/ folder (no other mods required — OpenTelemetry is bundled)
2. Start the server once to generate the config file
3. Set your OTLP endpoint URL and service name in the config
4. Point your observability stack at the endpoint and start collecting

A Grafana dashboard is included in each release for a ready-to-use starting point.

Configuration

All options are available in the NeoForge mod config (tracebullet-common.toml):

• OTLP endpoint URL
• Service name
• Custom resource attributes
• Per-metric enable/disable toggles
• Thread pool sizing

Wiki

Find a getting start guide, a list of all metrics and configuration on the wiki:

https://github.com/korti11/tracebullet/wiki