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Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

gRPC is also just HTTP too, yet these tools go much much further to provide good observability of the specific gRPC transactions happening over HTTP. With this application level protocols flowing atop the hypertext transfer protocol, being able to reach in & see what the app protocol doing is invaluable for observability. So no, just about none of these tools will have actually good Connect-Web support. Being able to see streams, parameters, a host of other capabilities is unlikely to just work fine.

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Unless you're all-in on server streaming, the Connect protocol is indistinguishable from RESTful HTTP to this class of L7 proxies - it's just a POST to a Protobuf-looking path, with an `application/json` or `application/proto` Content-Type. Most of the proxies/service mesh things that provide rich gRPC instrumentation are also capable of providing rich instrumentation for this style of HTTP.

I dunno. I'd like to see some comparisons. HTTP is so broad. Observability tools do good with it. But I think it's deceitful & disingenuous to blow this topic off like this.

Streams use features like HTTP2+ Push, & there's all manner of semantic meaning implicit in headers & schemas that regular http wont see that these tools pick up on. I want to be sold that the complex multi-directional multi-stream works fine, are fully observable, but I suspect seriously we're overreducing, not being honest, by discarding the difficulties of tuning observability to specific protocols here & saying general http support will buy us everything.

I'm honestly confused as to what your gripe is. I've done it all, OpenAPI, graphql, gRPC -- what exactly is difficult observability wise? Can you provide some specifics as to what is problematic?

HTTP is broad, and some things are easier to observe than others. Something like streaming or websockets is by definition more complex than the most basic possible HTTP request/response. Your complaint boils down to "using features makes observability difficult", which is obviously true in some sense, but you're dismissive of what those features unlock.

You must despise graphql.

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