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I don't quite get it, what does this do? The readme says absolutely nothing (e.g. "The OpenTelemetry specification describes the cross-language requirements an

by lucb1e 6y ago

I don't quite get it, what does this do? The readme says absolutely nothing (e.g. "The OpenTelemetry specification describes the cross-language requirements and expectations for all OpenTelemetry implementations." and goes on to describe how to submit changes or on which proprietary platform meeting minutes can be found) and the Overview document goes into depths about terminology (what a trace is, what a span within a trace is, how to link spans, etc.). Nowhere does it say if this is supposed to, for example, replace proprietary crash reporting in apps so that we can know what is being reported back to the mothership, or if this is something completely different.

harpratap 6y ago
You can check the first link that states the overview - https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/blob/master/specification/overview.md https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specificatio... It's a distributed request tracing specification & set of libraries implementing the said spec
- austinlparker 6y ago
  we also explain it a bit on our website, https://opentelemetry.io https://opentelemetry.io
  - systemvoltage 6y ago
    The fact that this is the top comment and most people are confused about what Open Telemetry is about should indicate that it is not clear. This is too often a mistake - not knowingly. It's like proof reading, I always think my writing is correct until someone else points out mistakes.
    - austinlparker 6y ago
      Thanks for the feedback, I just opened a PR to add a link from the spec readme to our website to hopefully guide people to better information.
      - systemvoltage 6y ago
        I want to clarify about my comment and what I meant - when you're working on your own product for many months and years, it is hard to know what others don't know about the product. Similar to proof reading, your eyes just "gloss" over :) I didn't mean to patronize or say you made a mistake.
      - m12k 6y ago
        With so many people finding things via GitHub, I'd highly recommend also including a single paragraph at the top of the repo readme to explain what it is, rather than expect people to be curious enough to go digging for more info. E.g. you could use the explanation from the website: "OpenTelemetry provides a single set of APIs, libraries, agents, and collector services to capture distributed traces and metrics from your application. You can analyze them using Prometheus, Jaeger, and other observability tools."
        faichai 6y ago
        Yeah, particularly for a developer oriented product. GitHub readme is essentially a landing page and should be treated the same way, not assuming any foreknowledge for the reader.
      - mikewarot 6y ago
        Before I stopped reading, there was an example of a button being pushed... but there was no actual trace of a button being pushed... just lots of words and descriptions, which killed it for me. I just want to see what I'm getting into, not a vocabulary or jargon lesson, at least at first. That would lead us to then wonder why it was done that way, etc... and drive interest.
  - watt 6y ago
    why not just put a couple paragraphs on top of the readme to explain what it is, what does it do, and add this link, instead of posting in a forum where nobody will see it.
tmd83 6y ago
A specific question I had was tracing seems to be all about distributed context (from the way everyone talks/market it) where each distributed call is captured in a span. But I didn't see (perhaps I missed it) about tracing inside a single instance where I want the individual method call to be traced to know which method call was expensive within that instance.
- harpratap 6y ago
  You can check out Mastering Distributed Tracing by Yuri Shkuro (the author of Jaeger). Lesson 2 talks about tracing monoliths - https://github.com/yurishkuro/opentracing-tutorial/tree/master/go/lesson02 https://github.com/yurishkuro/opentracing-tutorial/tree/mast...
- maurys 6y ago
  Spans are intervals with a start and stop and a set of tags for querying. These can be local or cross-service. I guess the documentation focusses on the "distributed" part of tracing but it works perfectly well for local spans too.

by lucb1e 6y ago

harpratap 6y ago

You can check the first link that states the overview - https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/blob/master/specification/overview.md https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specificatio... It's a distributed request tracing specification & set of libraries implementing the said spec

austinlparker 6y ago
we also explain it a bit on our website, https://opentelemetry.io https://opentelemetry.io
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  The fact that this is the top comment and most people are confused about what Open Telemetry is about should indicate that it is not clear. This is too often a mistake - not knowingly. It's like proof reading, I always think my writing is correct until someone else points out mistakes.
  - austinlparker 6y ago
    Thanks for the feedback, I just opened a PR to add a link from the spec readme to our website to hopefully guide people to better information.
    - systemvoltage 6y ago
      I want to clarify about my comment and what I meant - when you're working on your own product for many months and years, it is hard to know what others don't know about the product. Similar to proof reading, your eyes just "gloss" over :) I didn't mean to patronize or say you made a mistake.
    - m12k 6y ago
      With so many people finding things via GitHub, I'd highly recommend also including a single paragraph at the top of the repo readme to explain what it is, rather than expect people to be curious enough to go digging for more info. E.g. you could use the explanation from the website: "OpenTelemetry provides a single set of APIs, libraries, agents, and collector services to capture distributed traces and metrics from your application. You can analyze them using Prometheus, Jaeger, and other observability tools."
      - faichai 6y ago
        Yeah, particularly for a developer oriented product. GitHub readme is essentially a landing page and should be treated the same way, not assuming any foreknowledge for the reader.
    - mikewarot 6y ago
      Before I stopped reading, there was an example of a button being pushed... but there was no actual trace of a button being pushed... just lots of words and descriptions, which killed it for me. I just want to see what I'm getting into, not a vocabulary or jargon lesson, at least at first. That would lead us to then wonder why it was done that way, etc... and drive interest.
- watt 6y ago
  why not just put a couple paragraphs on top of the readme to explain what it is, what does it do, and add this link, instead of posting in a forum where nobody will see it.

tmd83 6y ago

A specific question I had was tracing seems to be all about distributed context (from the way everyone talks/market it) where each distributed call is captured in a span. But I didn't see (perhaps I missed it) about tracing inside a single instance where I want the individual method call to be traced to know which method call was expensive within that instance.

harpratap 6y ago
You can check out Mastering Distributed Tracing by Yuri Shkuro (the author of Jaeger). Lesson 2 talks about tracing monoliths - https://github.com/yurishkuro/opentracing-tutorial/tree/master/go/lesson02 https://github.com/yurishkuro/opentracing-tutorial/tree/mast...
maurys 6y ago
Spans are intervals with a start and stop and a set of tags for querying. These can be local or cross-service. I guess the documentation focusses on the "distributed" part of tracing but it works perfectly well for local spans too.