[drewbug01]

As a contributor to (and consumer of) OpenTelemetry, I think critique and feedback is most welcome - and sorely needed.

But this ain’t it. In the opening paragraphs the author dismisses the hardest parts of the problem (presumably because they are human problems, which engineers tend to ignore), and betrays a complete lack of interest in understanding why things ended up this way. It also seems they’ve completely misunderstood the API/SDK split in its entirety - because they argue for having such a split. It’s there - that’s exactly what exists!

And it goes on and on. I think it’s fair to critique OpenTelemetry; it can be really confusing. The blog post is evidence of that, certainly. But really it just reads like someone who got frustrated that they didn’t understand how something worked - and so instead of figuring it out, they’ve decided that it’s just hot garbage. I wish I could say this was unusual amongst engineers, but it isn’t.

[zeeg]

Author here.

That’s kind of making my point for me fwiw. It’s too complicated. I consider myself a product person so this is my version of that lens on the problem.

I’m not dismissing the people problem at all - I actually am trying to suggest the technology problem is the easier part (eg a basic spec). Getting it implemented, making it easy to understand, etc is where I see it struggling right now.

Aside this is not just my feedback, it’s a synthesis of what I’m hearing (but also what I believe).

[klabb3]

No dog in the fight here, but… you're saying that one of the top guys at a major observability shop didn’t understand Open Telemetry, then that’s saying much more about OT than it does about his skills or efforts to understand. After all, his main point is that it’s complex and overengineered, which is the key takeaway for curious bystanders like me, whether every detail is technically correct or not.

> it just reads like someone who […] didn’t understand how something worked - and so instead of figuring it out, they’ve decided that it’s just hot garbage.

And what about average developers asked to “add telemetry” to their apps and libraries? Their patience will be much lower than that.

Not necessarily defending the content (frankly it should have had more examples), but I relate to the sentiment. As a developer, I need framework providers to make sane design decisions with minimal api surface, otherwise I’d rather build something bespoke or just not care.

[cdelsolar]

OTel is very easy to add.. I've added it to several Go projects. For some frameworks like .NET you can do it automatically. The harder/more annoying part is setting up a viewer/collector like Jaeger. I've done that too but just in memory and it fills up quick.

[bbkane]

For my small scale projects, Openobserve.ai has been super helpful. It ships as a single binary and (in non h/a setup) saves traces/logs/metrics to disk. I just set it up as a systems service and start sending telemetry via localhost. Code at https://github.com/bbkane/shovel_ansible/

[pdimitar]

Same, I love OpenObserve and shill for it a lot. Maybe more advanced users have more use-cases and I am blind to it but all three main pillars of OTel (tracing spans, metrics, logs) it serves very well for my purposes.

[cdelsolar]

Thanks for this. I hadn't heard of openobserve before. It looks awesome.

[pdimitar]

> After all, his main point is that it’s complex and overengineered, which is the key takeaway for curious bystanders like me, whether every detail is technically correct or not.

This is a gross over-simplification that will leave you with a very skewed view of reality. As a programmer I only ever had to add a library, configure the OTLP endpoint details (host, port, URI, sometimes query parameters as well) and it was done.

It might be "complex and overengineered" if you want to contribute to the OTel libraries but as a programmer-user you are seeing practically none of it. And I would also challenge the "complex and overengineered" part but for now I am not informed enough to do it.

[arccy]

indeed, it just sounds like they're complaining they don't have a seat at the table...