[lxrbst]

Cool idea, cool technology, cool project.

I really just don't get the "why", even after watching the ElixirConf presentation [1] about it. Like what is the use-case for this, specifically?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMgTIlgYB-U

[nickjj]

Same. There was a quick slide joking about how this solves the fully offline client side browser app problem but even Chris McCord said that in all his years of consulting, he's only gotten a handful of requests for these types of apps.

I'm sure they have their reasons for taking on such a project but as an outsider I would have liked to see more announcements that apply to what the majority of people are using Elixir for today (web apps). There's Nerves too which I'm not into personally, but there were things at the conf for that so I'm sure that crowd was happy.

For example, telemetry was announced over a year ago with a hint that it was being worked on next and will be implemented into Phoenix as a web dashboard in the future but there was no hint of that mentioned this year -- at least not in any of the Phoenix related talks and Chris' keynote. I also didn't see it in any of the other talk's titles. But telemetry is one of those things where if it existed in the form they talked about last year it would be one of the biggest killer features of any web framework available today (not a single one does what they proposed).

[josevalim]

Telemetry's core is done for a while and it has been announced at previous events. That's why we didn't put much focus into it this year.

You can learn more at Arkadiusz Gil's talk on ElixirConf EU (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOuyOmcDV1U). I also talked about it in my keynote (someone posted a video below) and Marlus also gave a demo at this ElixirConf of how we plan to use Telemetry in Broadway and how a dashboard may look like (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPu-P97-cbE).

At the same time, please remember that whatever we announce is not a promise, and the best way to make it happen is to get involved. :) For example, Telemetry is out there, Phoenix, Ecto and Plug already use it, so there is nothing stopping anyone from implementing the dashboard right now!

[nickjj]

> For example, Telemetry is out there, Phoenix, Ecto and Plug already use it, so there is nothing stopping anyone from implementing the dashboard right now!

That is very good to hear.

Is it still planned for Phoenix 1.x to have that /metrics dashboard as something that comes out of the box with little to no configuration or having to set up external tools?

The one mentioned in the 2018 talk you linked here: https://youtu.be/cOuyOmcDV1U?t=2147

[hauleth]

> hint that it was being worked on next and will be implemented into Phoenix as a web dashboard in the future but there was no hint of that mentioned this year

Currently there is EEF Observability WG that is working on integrating OpenTelemetry, so it will not be integrated into Phoenix, but will be more general and more cross-language solution for monitoring.

Source: I am part of that WG.

[nickjj]

Previously it was talked about that Elixir would create a telemetry library and then Phoenix (and other libraries like Ecto, etc.) would use it.

And the end goal was to have a Phoenix web UI that would come out of the box that you could goto and see a bunch of really useful things about your server's health, the BEAM but more importantly app specific things like DB query times and all of those interesting stats you would want to see. The beauty of it was you would get all of this for free / nearly free in terms of the work you had to do as an app developer.

Did all of that get scratched for OpenTelemetry? Do you happen to know of a timeline when end users could expect to see the benefits of this new standard in Elixir apps?

The official website at https://opentelemetry.io/ doesn't show Elixir as being a supported language.

[hauleth]

> Elixir would create a telemetry

Erlang `telemetry` is something different from OpenTelemetry.

> Phoenix (and other libraries like Ecto, etc.) would use it

And this is a fact. Both Plug, Phoenix, and Ecto are using Erlang's Telemetry library.

> And the end goal was to have a Phoenix web UI that would come out of the box that you could goto and see a bunch of really useful things about your server's health

This will probably be implemented as an external library in form of OpenTelemetry as I said.

> Did all of that get scratched for OpenTelemetry?

No, OpenTelemetry and Erlang's Telemetry have different goals. Erlang's Telemetry is meant to be lightweight metrics logging library with API for defining exposed metrics. OpenTelemetry is the OTP application that will ingest these metrics and will expose them to the external services like DataDog or Prometheus.

> The official website at https://opentelemetry.io/ doesn't show Elixir as being a supported language.

[Not all languages are listed on the website](https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-erlang).

[anthony_doan]

Current momentum is in liveview. I'm actually eagerly waiting for that to get up to a good version after the early adopters.

[nickjj]

Yeah, LV is definitely worthy. I'm excited for it too. Once LV drops with debounce / file upload support that will be enough to get me to incorporate it into an existing project.

[conradfr]

I think José Valim said in his talk that it was still targeted for Phoenix 1.5 but I'm not sure about the dashboard part.

It seems the momentum is currently on LiveView.

[nickjj]

Oh nice.

I wasn't at the event but I wasn't able to find Jose's keynote on: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0l2QTnO1P2iph-86HHilMQ/vid...

Seems they uploaded every video from the conference except his (at least at the time of writing this comment).

I asked him on IRC and he mentioned having video trouble during the talk. I really hope it was recorded and is salvageable!

[conradfr]

https://youtu.be/oUZC1s1N42Q

Found it in my history, it seems they delisted it.

[nickjj]

Great find. Yeah that clears up a lot about Telemetry.

I guess it was unlisted because of all of the slide flickering, but to anyone who is interested in watching it, it's very watchable and you can make everything out.

[bcardarella]

There was a technical issue during Jose's keynote. The video kept dropping out from his laptop. I don't know for certain but I suspect that is the reason why his video isn't public. Maybe they're going to re-record it but I cannot say for certain.

[Existenceblinks]

I watched that and appreciate engineering effort put into the project. I'm afraid of being over-engineered (Maybe not), and hard to contribute to. It's complex enough that we probably better writing webassembly code by hand.

[jacquesm]

When used properly this might give the option to develop in Erlang for both client and server side.