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Oh no. Now what should I use? I can't believe something that's actively in development is considered dead these days. Surely there's a better alternative with a

Oh no. Now what should I use? I can't believe something that's actively in development is considered dead these days. Surely there's a better alternative with as good or better community support, right? Right...?

preseinger 4y ago
The problem isn't a lack of community, it's that the project is solving a problem that isn't relevant to anyone except Fortune-X00 companies.
- phillipcarter 4y ago
  Yeah I'm gonna call bullshit on that one. I work daily with everyone from startups and nonprofits to big banks. They use OTel because it solves problems for them. They don't all use it the same way, but they use it.
- hooverd 4y ago
  So, public sector here. We use Honeycomb with OTel and it's most definitely solving our problems. It's incredible being able to see traces up and down our whole stack and pinpoint where an issue is.
  - preseinger 4y ago
    What RPS do you serve, net? Everything works to trivial scale, e.g. O(10k) RPS and below. Do you do more than that per server?
    - LewisJEllis 4y ago
      You sound like you're trying to have it both ways: "OTel solves a problem that is irrelevant unless you're massive" but also "well of COURSE it can work if you're not massive, how massive are you?" There are tons of startups and other not-fortune-x00 orgs benefitting from what OTel provides. Your claim that OTel is irrelevant outside fortune-x00 cos is very clearly not true.
      - preseinger 4y ago
        I don't agree that OTel delivers value to not-fortune-x00 orgs. It's bloatware and whatever benefits it delivers are more cheaply achieved with other solutions.
    - hooverd 4y ago
      Well, we're certainly not Fortune 500 scale, so it works for us.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
phillipcarter 4y ago
The person you're replying to seems to have an idealogical bent against OTel. I'll say that "moribund" is about as unrealistic a term as it gets for OTel, given that it's now the #2 CNCF project by activity and still growing. That said, OTel is far from being easy to adopt still, and despite a lot of us trying hard to change that, it's got a long way to go. If you're using one of the "major" languages (Java, .NET, JS, Python) then it's pretty easy to set up automatic instrumentation and a Collector that you can tee off to your preferred backend analysis tool. But if you need more context from your apps, manual instrumentation outside of tracing is pretty hit-or-miss, and you need to build up a vocabulary around concepts (Resources, attributes, baggage, context, spans, etc.) that isn't easy unless you've got the time to sink into it. It's extremely powerful and has the building blocks to let you capture just about any data you need, pluggable processors and exporters, etc. -- but these building blocks are very unevenly composed into easy-to-use, turnkey-ish components that a lot of people ultimately want.

preseinger 4y ago

The problem isn't a lack of community, it's that the project is solving a problem that isn't relevant to anyone except Fortune-X00 companies.

phillipcarter 4y ago
Yeah I'm gonna call bullshit on that one. I work daily with everyone from startups and nonprofits to big banks. They use OTel because it solves problems for them. They don't all use it the same way, but they use it.
hooverd 4y ago
So, public sector here. We use Honeycomb with OTel and it's most definitely solving our problems. It's incredible being able to see traces up and down our whole stack and pinpoint where an issue is.
- preseinger 4y ago
  What RPS do you serve, net? Everything works to trivial scale, e.g. O(10k) RPS and below. Do you do more than that per server?
  - LewisJEllis 4y ago
    You sound like you're trying to have it both ways: "OTel solves a problem that is irrelevant unless you're massive" but also "well of COURSE it can work if you're not massive, how massive are you?" There are tons of startups and other not-fortune-x00 orgs benefitting from what OTel provides. Your claim that OTel is irrelevant outside fortune-x00 cos is very clearly not true.
    - preseinger 4y ago
      I don't agree that OTel delivers value to not-fortune-x00 orgs. It's bloatware and whatever benefits it delivers are more cheaply achieved with other solutions.
  - hooverd 4y ago
    Well, we're certainly not Fortune 500 scale, so it works for us.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

phillipcarter 4y ago

The person you're replying to seems to have an idealogical bent against OTel. I'll say that "moribund" is about as unrealistic a term as it gets for OTel, given that it's now the #2 CNCF project by activity and still growing. That said, OTel is far from being easy to adopt still, and despite a lot of us trying hard to change that, it's got a long way to go. If you're using one of the "major" languages (Java, .NET, JS, Python) then it's pretty easy to set up automatic instrumentation and a Collector that you can tee off to your preferred backend analysis tool. But if you need more context from your apps, manual instrumentation outside of tracing is pretty hit-or-miss, and you need to build up a vocabulary around concepts (Resources, attributes, baggage, context, spans, etc.) that isn't easy unless you've got the time to sink into it. It's extremely powerful and has the building blocks to let you capture just about any data you need, pluggable processors and exporters, etc. -- but these building blocks are very unevenly composed into easy-to-use, turnkey-ish components that a lot of people ultimately want.