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Comment by petterroea | Hacker News Reader

This is cool, OTel is getting somewhere.

I've found OTel to still have rough edges and it's not really the one stop shop for telemetry we want it to be at $work yet. In particular, no good (sentry-style) exception capturing yet. They also recently changed a lot of metric names(for good reason it seems), which breaks most dashboards you find on the internet.

I have been warned by people that OTel isn't mature yet and I find it to still be true, but it seems the maintainers are trying to do something about this nowadays

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I think that the "issue" around otel is that instrumentation is easy and free (as both in beer and freedom) but then for the dashboarding part is where there are literally tens of different SaaS solutions, all more or less involved with the OTel development itself, that want you to use their solution (and pay $$$ for it). And even if you can go a loooong way with a self-hosted Grafana + Tempo, even Grafana Labs are putting more and more new features behind the Grafana Cloud subscription model.

Yeah. The auto dashboard stuff Grafana cloud is doing nowadays is cool (even if it's just Greg in engineering department writing heuristics), but I can't help but feel pissed that the oss dashboards for otel on Grafanas website aren't even up to date.

I use Grafana because it has value for me both at work and for hobby, but it's becoming more painful to use Grafana for hobby so I agree with your point

> but I can't help but feel pissed that the oss dashboards for otel on Grafanas website aren't even up to date.

Indeed. But nowadays you can just work 1 hour with Claude Code and get a pretty slick Grafana dashboard for whatever you need

do you have any suggestions for alternatives then (besides Sentry)? I do feel OTel have pretty wide support in general in term of traces.

I know a lot of shops that prefer the datadog stack, which apparently does have its own sentry-like exception capturing system. To me, exception capturing is an obvious core feature and it is humiliating to discuss OTel with people who agree, and use datadog and are satisfied.

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