What should people use?
With basic parameters in place so it doesn’t eat your billing, it’s been working great with me for years. Initially with New Relic, then Datadog, now a setup with OpenTelemetry is good enough.
With basic parameters in place so it doesn’t eat your billing, it’s been working great with me for years. Initially with New Relic, then Datadog, now a setup with OpenTelemetry is good enough.
You should "use" metrics, logs, and traces thru dependencies that are specific to your organization. The interface between your business logic and operational telemetry should be abstract, essentially the same as a database or a remote HTTP endpoint or etc. The concrete system(s) collecting and serving telemetry data are the responsibility of your dev/ops or whatever team.
Main point: instrumentation is part of the development process, not something that's automatic or that can be bolted-on.
There is no one true interface! The interface is a function of the sub-class of telemetry data it serves, the specific properties of the service(s) it supports, the teams it's used by, the organization that maintains it, etc. etc.
OTel tries to assert a general-purpose interface. But this is exactly the issue with the project. That interface doesn't exist.
I recall Apache Skywalking being pretty good, especially for smaller/medium scale projects: https://skywalking.apache.org/
The architecture is simple, the performance is adequate, it doesn't make you spend days configuring it and it even supports various different data stores: https://skywalking.apache.org/docs/main/v9.5.0/en/setup/back...
The problems with it are that it isn't super popular (although has agents for most popular stacks), the docs could be slightly better and I recall them also working on a new UI so there is a little bit of churn: https://skywalking.apache.org/downloads/
Still better versus some of the other options when you need something that just works instead of spending a lot of time configuring something (even when that something might be superior in regards to the features): https://github.com/apache/skywalking/blob/master/docker/dock...
Sentry comes to mind (OpenTelemetry also isn't simpler due to how much it tries to do, given all the separate parts), compare its complexity to Skywalking: https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/master/docker-...
I wish there was more self-hosted software like that out there, enough to address certain concerns in a simple way on day 1 and leave branching out to more complex options like OpenTelemetry once you have a separate team for that and the cash is rolling in.
Internally, OTEL has to keep track of every combination of labels it's seen since process start, which can easily come to dominate the processing time in an existing project. It's another in a long line of tools that dovetail with my overall software development philosophy which is that you can make pretty much any process work for 18 months before the wheels fall off.
By the time you notice OpenTelemetry is a problem, you've got 18 months of work to start trying to roll back.
I'm sure there are valid qualms with OTEL in general, but this ain't one of them. Any and all metrics telemetry systems can fall into the same design constraint you pointed out.
Push implementations do not have this problem at the client end.
Well, every unique combination of labels represents a discrete time series of telemetry data, and the total set of all time series in your entire organization always has to be of finite and reasonable cardinality. This means that label values always have to be finite e.g. enumerations, and never e.g. arbitrary values from user input.
> my overall software development philosophy which is that you can make pretty much any process work for 18 months before the wheels fall off.
The size of the set of labels in your process after (say) 1d of regular traffic should be basically the same size as after (say) 18m of regular traffic. If this isn't the case, it usually signals that you're stuffing invalid data into label values.