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Comment by splittingTimes | Hacker News Reader

We are trying to get a better understanding of how customers use our desktop application. We are urged by management to use Qualtrics, but it feels like it is not the right tool for the job.

How would you say does opentelemetry compare to Qualtrics?

Is Qualtrics a tool where users need to actively fill out surveys and opentelemetry collects passively user interactions?

There is also other names floating around in this space like DataDog or OpsTrace, where I am not clear how to place them.

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Though maybe not the typical case you could start creating spans for user workflows and compare the time it took to do workflow A vs alternative workflow B (in A/B testing). Or you can simply use metrics to collect usage information like how many times a certain action is performed in your system which may tell how popular it is.

I didn't think to much on this but I played with it once in a hackathon and made a tool that showed how one customer site performed versus another customer site by showing performance comparisons on workflow spans and augmenting this information with metrics of most used tools to get an indication if the other site was maybe faster because it used different parts of the product to perform certain actions faster.

OpenTelemetry allows you to measure performance of your frontend and backend, but it's not a survey tool. DataDog is one of many compatible backends that works with OpenTelemetry, but you can also use Jaeger OSS, Honeycomb, Lightstep, and others.

Strictly only the performance or can it also answer usage questions like:

When customers go through this workflow step, they use this option/button 90% of the time and the other options are used rarely?

BI/funnel analytics is a use case that you might have more luck with https://www.tinybird.co/ instead.

It may be possible, but it will not be pleasant to use tracing to answer those kinds of questions. Sounds like something you can do with off the shelf product analytics tools like Amplitude or Mixpanel. Do you already have something like that?

We're using New Relic track performance (API response times, DB load, etc) as well as to track actions that users make on our front ends and APIs.

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