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That's an interesting distinction. Given some of the older, larger code bases, manually instrumenting seems like it would require a reasonably large effort. I think that's one of the huge benefits that some of the APM's bring.

I wonder if there is any reason OTEL can't have both.

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OTel kind of has both today. Most languages support autoinstrumentation via either an agent, libraries, or both. So for example, if you've got a big Spring Boot app, it'll instrument requests/responses and DB calls for you. Some languages also have lightweight "sprinkle some spans on it" things you can put in code, like Java method annotations. But none have truly automatic "span for every method call" instrumentation.

Yeah, I've used the Ruby one, and the results were... painful.

For stuff on the JVM, you just load the APM plugin and you're pretty much good to go as it inspects the bytecode, i believe.

Oh, right. I guess my question was more around "why can't OTEL _also_ have something that does that"?

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