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Logs and OpenTelemetry are not at all exclusive. One downside of straight-up OTel instrumentation is that id adds a certain overhead in the form of side-request
by BerislavLopac 2y ago
Logs and OpenTelemetry are not at all exclusive. One downside of straight-up OTel instrumentation is that id adds a certain overhead in the form of side-requests to the collector.
Most platforms/languages have logging built in, and it's perfectly possible to emit OTel-compatible log messages (like the linked article recommends) and collect them using some agent like Prometheus.
- andrewstuart2 2y agoWell the thing is, you can get smart with OTel traces on both the client and the collector by implementing a smarter Sampler. Even something as simple as cached requests for the latest error rates that influence your sample rate can help you catch errors more effectively while limiting overhead and cost. These are things you could do in a logger but it's not part of the design as it is with tracing. In general, logging is definitely easier and more ubiquitous, but there are a lot more "best practices" that you have to enforce vs simply having been built into the APIs like they've been with distributed tracing.