Hacker News Reader

Comment by gttalbot | Hacker News Reader

And yeah, everyone used the same instrumentation library, which could be used in a lot of different contexts, sometimes surprising!

View on HN

Again, a highly envious feature of a large organisation with almost exclusively bespoke applications that can port & integrate custom libraries directly into applications. Us little people have to contend with mostly black box applications, or occasionally native instrumented with at best a prom-alike endpoint.

Amusingly in the pre-web 1990's, at Telstra (Australia telco) we also developed & implemented a custom performance monitoring library that was integrated into in-house applications.

The rest of us can only hope Opentelemetry becomes more widely adopted. They have put in a lot of effort in decoupling the application instrumentation from the monitoring solution, to allow more rich instrumentation than just a prom-alike endpoint.

Yeah I hope OpenTelemetry works out as well.

Yeah that's a tough one, and it was indeed a luxury to be able to have a uniform instrumentation library.

Re-reading my comment, it may have been worded badly.

The phrase 'you aren't Google' is true for 99.9% of us. We all get to fix the problems in front of us, was my point. And at that scale you've got unique problems, but also an architecture, imperative, and most importantly an ethos that lets you solve them in this fashion.

I was more reflecting on the (actually pretty fine) tools available to SREs caring for off-the-shelf OS's and products, and a little on the whole 'we keep coming full circle' thing.

Anyway, I very much appreciate the insights.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com