[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What's Your Opinion on Opentelemetry?
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       Ask HN: What's Your Opinion on Opentelemetry?
        
       I've been looking to instrument opentelemetry into my app, and I
       was wondering what your guys experiences was with it.  Would you
       use it for small/medium sized projects?  What was the most annoying
       part about setting it up?  What's your general experience with the
       opentelemetry ecosystem?  I'm curious about any opinions you might
       have
        
       Author : Nevin1901
       Score  : 17 points
       Date   : 2023-10-23 01:03 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
       | viraptor wrote:
       | > Would you use it for small/medium sized projects?
       | 
       | Depends what your requirements are - what's the problem you're
       | trying to solve? The size doesn't matter. If may want to
       | instrument a 3 line script and ignore a massive app. It's fine
       | either way.
       | 
       | > What was the most annoying part about setting it up?
       | 
       | That's going to be highly dependent on which part of
       | opentelemetry you use and how. It's a protocol with lots of
       | possible uses and implementations. You'll need to be more
       | specific with what you're expecting to send, from where, and to
       | what system.
       | 
       | In general, if you need it, it works. But what I'm mostly trying
       | to say is that you'll need to do some more research and info
       | gathering on your own to ask questions that others can answer.
       | This one is at the level of "what's your opinion on cars?"
        
       | arwhatever wrote:
       | I always had in my back pocket a goal to learn OpenTelemetry, but
       | some recent unfavorable HN commentary left me surprised and
       | deflated.
       | 
       | I wouldn't mind reading some more critical review.
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37295097
        
       | csomar wrote:
       | OpenTelemetry is kind of a standard for logs with a bunch of
       | libraries. These libraries have different standards (in terms of
       | optimization rigor). The whole thing is not well orchestrated
       | together. So OT might good for a certain language/stack and
       | completely suck for another. Also, your instrumentation software
       | might be OT compatible but have nothing to do what-so-ever with
       | OT the organization.
       | 
       | At this point, you'd be shopping for Cloud providers and using
       | the one that makes most sense in terms of performance and ease of
       | integration.
        
       | awoimbee wrote:
       | We use Tempo and python, implementation was super fast, it now
       | permits optimizing our API endpoints. My conclusion:
       | opentelemetry is great, go for it, find a lib to easily
       | instrument your code
        
       | quectophoton wrote:
       | What I wanted: Small library that just prints to stdout in a
       | standard format. No network code in that library. A separate
       | executable that actually sends the logs to wherever needed, and
       | whose vulnerabilities can be fixed independently from my app.
       | 
       | What I got: The kubernetes of observability. Load a bunch of
       | libraries that connect to the network from inside your app. If
       | you can't use automatic instrumentation then now you have setup
       | your exporters, providers, processors, and whatever. Everything
       | feels too brittle. Its big surface area means I fear the next
       | refactor where every setting will get a different name and
       | functions get deprecated even if the actual telemetry format
       | doesn't change.
        
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       (page generated 2023-10-23 09:01 UTC)