4 ms·

> OTel is flawed for sure, but I don't understand the stance against metrics and logs. Even if you don't want to consider the privacy concerns: telemetry waste

> OTel is flawed for sure, but I don't understand the stance against metrics and logs. Even if you don't want to consider the privacy concerns: telemetry wastes quite some data of your internet connection.

spenczar5 2y ago
Client-side transport is pretty unusual with OTel. I think almost everybody is sending things from the server side, so I don’t think your concern is usually relevant.
cogman10 2y ago
Hey, this isn't the sort of telemetry we are talking about with OTel. About the only "privacy concern" with otel is that you are probably shipping traces/metrics to a cloud provider for your internal applications. This isn't the sort of telemetry getting baked into ms or google that is used to try and identify personal aspects of individuals, this is data that tells you "Foo app is taking 300ms serving /bar which is unusual".
- cdelsolar 2y ago
  After I added OTel to an open source project I run, I spent a bit of time arguing with someone about telemetry - they kept saying they didn't opt in and that we need to inform our users about it, etc., and I kept saying no, that's not the same type of telemetry. I wonder how common this misconception is.
  - cogman10 2y ago
    This is the second time I've seen this misconception come up in HN and I've definitely seen it in Reddit at least once.
  - remram 2y ago
    OpenTracing was a much clearer name, especially for those of us who really don't care about doing logging or metrics through OTel.
wdb 2y ago
I think you are more talking about RUM which isn't yet supported by OpenTelemetry. I think they are working on it. I am not sure if it will support session replays like some vendors like Sentry or New Relic offer. Technically, I think session replays (rrweb etc) is pretty cool but as a web visitor I am not a fan.

4 ms·

> OTel is flawed for sure, but I don't understand the stance against metrics and logs. Even if you don't want to consider the privacy concerns: telemetry waste

by aleph_minus_one 2y ago

spenczar5 2y ago
Client-side transport is pretty unusual with OTel. I think almost everybody is sending things from the server side, so I don’t think your concern is usually relevant.
cogman10 2y ago
Hey, this isn't the sort of telemetry we are talking about with OTel. About the only "privacy concern" with otel is that you are probably shipping traces/metrics to a cloud provider for your internal applications. This isn't the sort of telemetry getting baked into ms or google that is used to try and identify personal aspects of individuals, this is data that tells you "Foo app is taking 300ms serving /bar which is unusual".
- cdelsolar 2y ago
  After I added OTel to an open source project I run, I spent a bit of time arguing with someone about telemetry - they kept saying they didn't opt in and that we need to inform our users about it, etc., and I kept saying no, that's not the same type of telemetry. I wonder how common this misconception is.
  - cogman10 2y ago
    This is the second time I've seen this misconception come up in HN and I've definitely seen it in Reddit at least once.
  - remram 2y ago
    OpenTracing was a much clearer name, especially for those of us who really don't care about doing logging or metrics through OTel.
wdb 2y ago
I think you are more talking about RUM which isn't yet supported by OpenTelemetry. I think they are working on it. I am not sure if it will support session replays like some vendors like Sentry or New Relic offer. Technically, I think session replays (rrweb etc) is pretty cool but as a web visitor I am not a fan.