OpenTelemetry Is Too Complicated, VictoriaMetrics Says

Mirrors my experience implementing OpenTelemetry in Go apps. The opentelemetry-go library is 90k SLOC... So 50% of Redis?

I have a lot of respect for Aliaksandr Valialkin[1], we use his FastHTTP and Quicktemplate libraries every day on dozens of projects and they purr.

[1]: https://github.com/valyala

The article specifically talks about metrics part of Otel. Having read a bit of the script, I agree, it is very bloated. Statsd is a very mature and lean protocol, even with the Datadog extensions to add tagging. It is a defacto open standard that predates Otel. It may well be that people who want to stick to a lean open standard will stick with using statsd or its extended versions for collecting metrics.

The Tracing component is fine. It looks a little bloated, but it also supports distributed tracing, and has also defines schemas and semantics for trace attributes. I can look that up instead of figuring that stuff out on my own.

As far as rumors about Datadog bloating it up to make it fail … their official Nodejs sdk library pulls in Otel tracing under the hood, and the library interface was reimplemented to incorporate that. The agent you install will accept otel traces. It seems to me that this is a path towards allowing people to transition to using otel.

Datadog’s strategy, at least to an outside observer to me, builds a moat that relies on synergies and products that are more useful when you can ingest from more sources. The kind of features they have been adding in the past two years (since the 1.0 release of Otel) includes appsec scanning, infrastructure anomaly scanning, security anomaly scanning, sql database analysis (what pganalyze does for just Postgres), streaming data pipeline (such as kafks) tracing and analysis, CI/CD integration, cloud cost monitoring and analysis. Those all cost money.

The lockin happens when you sign an annual contract because the on demand costs are a noticable percentage of your cloud costs. Looking at their whole platform and their business model, Otel looks to me the way they can reduce switching costs and lock you in with their other products after you switch.

wasn't datadog accused of "helping" the project to the point of ensuring their solution was simpler?

tldr;

OTel standard is mature, but the open source implementation is too bulky. So they wrote their own library