In the age of supply chain attack weariness and general risk skyrocketing, it is a bit funny seeing the many observability vendors wanting you to give them kernel mode access. And it's sad that most apps that will be most in need of automatic instrumentation are "frozen" rarely developed / updated apps at critical institutions like banks.

As for the original post, opentelemetry is forced to be relatively slow because of a huge amount of semantic conventions that are meant to make data more useful. I won't go into the legitimacy of that, but while I haven't been able to verify the data this solution records, it is very unlikely to be recording as much information. Manual instrumentation would never loose to eBPF in principle, at least in a compiled language like Go, but eBPF does have great potential to perform better than OTel while recording far less data. Then comes blog post, users giving the keys to their kernel, and data ending up in the hands of an enemy state. I doubt that's the case this time but it's only a matter of time.

Banking apps if you see this, please just instrument your code. Thank you.