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I don't think that's true. It seems like it's more of a "oh shit, all this open source software emits Prometheus metrics and Jaeger traces, but we want to sell

I don't think that's true. It seems like it's more of a "oh shit, all this open source software emits Prometheus metrics and Jaeger traces, but we want to sell our proprietary alternatives to these and don't want to upstream patches to every project". (Datadog had a literal army of people adding datadog support to OSS projects. Honestly, probably a great early-career job; diving into unfamiliar codebases is a superpower.) OTel lets the open source projects use an abstraction layer so that you can buy instead of self-host. None of this has ever made me feel super great, but in the end I would probably consider OTel today for services that people other than my company operate. That way if some user wants to use Datadog, we're not in their way. I used OTel in the very very early days and was rather disappointed; the Go APIs were extremely inefficient (a context.Context is needed to increment a counter? no IO in my request path please), and abstracted leakily (no way to set histogram buckets when exporting to Prometheus). I assume they probably fixed that stuff at some point, though.

morelisp 3y ago
OTel is the backend, in-program equivalent of "we need all of five analytics systems on our frontend to figure out that users bounce when our page takes 10s to load because it has five analytics systems in it".
- esafak 3y ago
  What do you use?
the_duke 3y ago
What helps hosted data collectors helps self-hosting setups just as much. More and more solutions are getting built in OTEL support, which means you can relatively seamlessly switch between backends without changing anything in your application code.
- morelisp 3y ago
  This only makes sense if you're in a world where you're switching backends more than once, which means you're not seriously programming, you're just burning VC money for lottery tickets.
  - jrockway 3y ago
    I agree with this. For internal apps, pick a system and stick with it. If you're excited by Datadog's marketing pitch, just buy it and use it. It will not make or break your startup; like if your Datadog bill is what's standing between you and profitability, then you probably didn't actually find product/market fit. Switching to Prometheus at that point also won't help you find product/market fit. In the 2 jobs where I've set up the production environment, I just picked Prometheus/Jaeger/cloud provider log storage/Grafana on day 1 and have never been disappointed. You explode the helm chart into your cluster over the course of 30 minutes, and then move on to making something great (or spending a week debugging Webpack; can't help you with that one).
    - esafak 3y ago
      You had better have PMF if you pick Datadog! https://thenewstack.io/datadogs-65m-bill-and-why-developers-should-care/ https://thenewstack.io/datadogs-65m-bill-and-why-developers-...
  - nijave 3y ago
    Also useful for local dev (you can still use it locally without a SaaS backend) and it helps with interoperability. Infrastructure like Envoy and nginx can emit spans that integrate with 1st party code and other 3rd party code. OSS libraries are more likely to implement an open standard so they just plug and play and emit data for internal things they're doing (especially helpful for things like DB and HTTP)

morelisp 3y ago

OTel is the backend, in-program equivalent of "we need all of five analytics systems on our frontend to figure out that users bounce when our page takes 10s to load because it has five analytics systems in it".

esafak 3y ago
What do you use?

the_duke 3y ago

What helps hosted data collectors helps self-hosting setups just as much. More and more solutions are getting built in OTEL support, which means you can relatively seamlessly switch between backends without changing anything in your application code.

morelisp 3y ago
This only makes sense if you're in a world where you're switching backends more than once, which means you're not seriously programming, you're just burning VC money for lottery tickets.
- jrockway 3y ago
  I agree with this. For internal apps, pick a system and stick with it. If you're excited by Datadog's marketing pitch, just buy it and use it. It will not make or break your startup; like if your Datadog bill is what's standing between you and profitability, then you probably didn't actually find product/market fit. Switching to Prometheus at that point also won't help you find product/market fit. In the 2 jobs where I've set up the production environment, I just picked Prometheus/Jaeger/cloud provider log storage/Grafana on day 1 and have never been disappointed. You explode the helm chart into your cluster over the course of 30 minutes, and then move on to making something great (or spending a week debugging Webpack; can't help you with that one).
  - esafak 3y ago
    You had better have PMF if you pick Datadog! https://thenewstack.io/datadogs-65m-bill-and-why-developers-should-care/ https://thenewstack.io/datadogs-65m-bill-and-why-developers-...
- nijave 3y ago
  Also useful for local dev (you can still use it locally without a SaaS backend) and it helps with interoperability. Infrastructure like Envoy and nginx can emit spans that integrate with 1st party code and other 3rd party code. OSS libraries are more likely to implement an open standard so they just plug and play and emit data for internal things they're doing (especially helpful for things like DB and HTTP)