I’ve been working on an open source project built on OpenTelemetry and Prometheus client libraries (https://autometrics.dev). The DX of the OTel libraries is pretty painful in all the languages we’ve used. Granted, we’re using them for metrics while traces are more common, but still.

I think the fundamental issue for the DX is that it’s trying to do everything everyone might want out of all of the observability signals. That’s a useful and laudable goal but it means that everything is configurable and it sometimes feels like there are too many knobs that you can and must adjust to get it to do what you want.