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Benchmarking OpenTelemetry: Can AI trace your failed login?

144 points by stared 9mo ago

whalesalad 9mo ago
If everyone else is the problem... maybe you are the problem. To me this says more about OTel than AI.
- apercu 9mo ago
  Can you help me understand where you are coming from? Is it that you think the benchmark is flawed or overly harsh? Or that you interpret the tone as blaming AI for failing a task that is inherently tricky or poorly specified? My takeaway was more "maybe AI coding assistants today aren’t yet good at this specific, realistic engineering task"....
  - hobofan 9mo ago
    In my experience many OTEL libraries are aweful to use and most of the "official" ones are the worst offenders as the are largely codegened. That typically makes them feel clunky to use and they exhibit code patterns that are non-native to the language used, which would an explanation of why AI systems struggle with the benchmark. I think you would see similar results if tasking an AI to e.g. write GRPC/Protobuf systems using only the builtin/official protobuf codegen languages. Where I think the benchmark is quite fair is in the solutions. It looks like for each of the languages (at least the ones I'm familiar with), the "better" options were chosen, e.g. using `tracing-opentelemtry` rather than `opentelemetry-sdk` directly in Rust. However the one-shot nature of the benchmark also isn't that reflective of the actual utility. In my experience, if you have the initial framework setup done in your repo + a handful of examples, they do a great job of applying OTEL tracing to the majority of your project.
  - pixl97 9mo ago
    Where I work we are looking at a lot of our documentation and implementations where AI has a hard time when doing it. This almost always correlates with customers having similar issues in getting things working. This has lead us to rewrite a lot of documentation to be more consistent and clear. In addition we set out series of examples from simple to complex. This shows as less tickets later, and more complex implementations being setup by customers without the need for support.
- vimda 9mo ago
  But not everyone else is the problem? OTel works fine for humans. Sometimes AIs are just shit
  - devin 9mo ago
    It's not a new thing to bring up that OTel is difficult to get correct. This was a criticism levied before the AI era.
  - heliumtera 9mo ago
    That is a wild claim my dude. Some of the comments here would challenge the claim that otel has worked pretty well for humans.
jcims 9mo ago
I've been building an 'sre agent' with LangGraph for the past couple of weeks and honestly I've been incredibly impressed with the ability for frontier models, when properly equipped with useful tools and context, to quickly diagnose issues and suggest reasonable steps to remediate. Primary tooling for me is access to source code, cicd environment and infrastructure control plane. Some cues in the context to inform basic conventions really helps. Even when it's not particularly effective, the additional information provided tends to be quite useful.
- nsjdkdkdk 9mo ago
  [dead]
dgxyz 9mo ago
Our humans struggle with them too. It’s the only domain where you need actually to know everything. I wouldn’t touch this with a pole if our MTTR was dependent on it being successful though.
- vasco 9mo ago
  I can say that as someone that does this for a job for a while, it's starting to be useful in many domains related to SRE that make parts of the job easier. MCP servers for monitoring tools are making our developers more competent at finding metrics and issues. It'll get there but nobody is going to type "fix my incident" in production and have a nice time today outside of the most simple things that if they are possible to fix like this, could've been automated already anyway. But between writing a runbook and automating sometimes takes time so those use cases will grow.
another_twist 9mo ago
[flagged]
asyncadventure 9mo ago
[dead]
- jakozaur 9mo ago
  In this benchmark, micro-services are really small, ~300 lines, and sometimes just two of them. More realistic tasks (large codebases, more microservices) would have a lower success rate.
  - ndriscoll 9mo ago
    I'd expect it to actually do better in a large codebase. e.g. you'd already have an HTTP middleware stack, so it'd know that it can just add a layer to that for traces (and in fact there might already be off-the-shelf layers for whatever framework) vs. having to invent that on its own for the bare microservice.
winton 9mo ago
So if I try to do it with Opus three or four times, I'll get it done? And probably in about 10 minutes? Awesome
- throwup238 9mo ago
  That’s only if the failures are truly random and aren’t correlated
- stared 9mo ago
  Nope, these are no random dice rolls. Some times are solved each run, a few - occasionally (so here would be meaningful to try a few times - and metrics of pass@1 and pass@3 would be different), but most are never solved. See e.g.: https://quesma.com/benchmarks/otel/models/claude-opus-4.5/ https://quesma.com/benchmarks/otel/models/claude-opus-4.5/
AnotherGoodName 9mo ago
This is a little damning of the way Google does things honestly. >When an app runs on a single machine, you can often trace an error by scrolling through a log file. But when it runs across 50 microservices, that single request gets scattered into a chaotic firehose of disconnected events. Yep this is about Google. It's painful for humans to debug and it's also an extremely bespoke issue to deal with. No one else has quite the same level of clusterfuck and there's going to be no training for LLMs on this.
- youknownothing 9mo ago
  isn't that what trace IDs are for?
  - belval 9mo ago
    Yeah I don't know their stack but I have a service that is a collection of microservices and Opus can debug them fine by aggregating the logs tied to the same faulty request ID. In general for those tasks though the question is more "How would a human do it". If it's impossible for a human because your tooling is so bad you can't even get the logs across services for a single ID, that seems like a pretty serious design issue. In general looking at the prompt though, this is also not very representative. You don't have an SOP that you can share with your agent? How do you expect new hires to onboard?
    - pixl97 9mo ago
      >How do you expect new hires to onboard? I've seen some places that pretty much say "Good luck, we hope you can swim. Life preserver not provided"
  - pixl97 9mo ago
    Much like nested errors, management of trace IDs becomes difficult under scale as you will start getting multiple correlation references in complex systems.
- tayo42 9mo ago
whynotminot 9mo ago
I would wager the main reason for this is the same reason it’s also hard to teach these skills to people: there’s not a lot of high quality training for distributed debugging of complex production issues. Competence comes from years of experience fighting fires. Very few people start their careers as SREs, it’s generally something they migrate into after enjoying it and showing aptitude for it. With that said, I wouldn’t expect this wall to hold up for too long. There has been a lot of low hanging fruit teaching models how to code. When that is saturated, the frontier companies will likely turn their attention to honing training environments for SRE style debug.
- lysace 9mo ago
  > With that said, I wouldn’t expect this wall to hold up for too long. The models are already so good at the traditionally hard stuff: collecting that insane amount of detailed knowledge across so many different domains, languages and software stacks.
- heliumtera 9mo ago
  There is definitely more to the inability for models to perform well at SRE. One, it is not engineering, it is next token prediction, it is vibes. They could do Site Reliability Vibing or something like that. When we ask it to generate an image, any image will do it. We couldn't care less. Try to sculpt it, try to rotate it 45 degrees and all hell breaks loose. The image would be rotated but the hair color could change as well. Pure vibes! When you ask it to refactor your code, any pattern would do it. You could rearrange the code in infinite ways, rename variables in infinite ways without fundamentally breaking logic. You could make as many arbitrary bullshit abstraction and call it good, as people have done it for years with OOP. It does not matter at all, any result would do it in this cases. When you want to hit an specific gRPC endpoint, you need an specific address and the method expects an specific contract to be honored. This either matches or it doesn't. When you wish the llms could implement a solution that captures specifics syscalls from specifics hosts and send traces to an specific platform, using an specific protocol, consolidating records on a specific bucket...you have one state that satisfy your needs and 100 requirement that needs to necessarily be fulfilled. It either meet all the requirements or it's no good. It truly is different from Vibing and llms will never be able to do in this. Maybe agents will, depending on the harnesses, on the systems in place, but one model just generate words words words with no care about nothing else
raincole 9mo ago
Original title: Benchmarking OpenTelemetry: Can AI trace your failed login? HN Editorialized: OTelBench: AI struggles with simple SRE tasks (Opus 4.5 scores only 29%) The task: > Your task is: Add OTEL tracing to all microservices. > Requirements: > Instrumentation should match conventions and well-known good practices. > Instrumentation must match the business domain of the microservices. > Traces must be sent to the endpoint defined by a standard OTEL environment variable. > Use the recent version of the OTEL SDK. I really don't think anything involved with multiple microservices can be called 'simple' even to humans. Perhaps to an expert who knows the specific business's domain knowledge it is.
- pixl97 9mo ago
  As someone whos job is support more than SWE, I agree with this. I've had to work in systems where events didn't share correlation IDs, I had to go in and filter entries down to microseconds to get a small enough number of entries that I could trace what actually happened between a set of services. From what I've seen in the enterprise software side of the world is a lot of companies are particularly bad at SRE and there isn't a great amount of standardization.
  - formerly_proven 9mo ago
    Top 20 company globally by revenue Enterprise app observability is purely a responsibility of each individual application/project manager. There is virtually no standardization or even shared infra, a team just stuffing plaintext logs into an unconfigured elasticsearch instance is probably above median already. There is no visibility for anything across departments and more often that not, not even across apps in a department.
- chaps 9mo ago
  Having done app support across many environments, um - yes, multiple microservices is usually pretty simple. Just look at the open file/network handles and go from there. It's absolutely maddening to watch these models flail in trying to do something basic as, "check if the port is open" or "check if the process is running... and don't kill firefox this time". These aren't challenging things to do for an experienced human at all. But it's such a huge pain point for these models! It's hard for me to wrap my head around how these models can write surprisingly excellent code but fail down in these sorts of relatively simple troubleshooting paths.
yomismoaqui 9mo ago
I'm a human with 20+ years of experience and making OTEL work on Go was painful. It made me remember when I was working on the J2EE ecosystem shudder
the_duke 9mo ago
This is very confusingly written. From the post I expected that the tasks were about analysing traces, but all the tasks in the repository are about adding instrumentation to code! Some of the instructions don't give any guidance how to do it, some specify which libraries to use. "Use standard OTEL patterns" ... that's about as useful as saying "go write some code". There are a lot of ways to do instrumentation.... I'd be very curious HOW exactly the models fail. Are the test sets just incredibly specific about what output they except, and you get a lot of failures because of tiny subtle mismatches? Or do they just get the instrumentation categorically wrong? Also important: do the models have access to a web search tool to read the library docs? Otel libraries are often complicated to use... without reading latest docs or source code this would be quite tricky. Some models have gotten better at adding dependencies, installing them and then reading the code from the respective directory where dependencies get stored, but many don't do well with this. All in all, I'm very skeptical that this is very useful as a benchmark as is. I'd be much more interested in tasks like: Here are trace/log outputs , here is the source code, find and fix the bug.
- pixl97 9mo ago
  >Some of the instructions don't give any guidance how to do it, some specify which libraries to use. In supporting a piece of cloud software with a lot of microservices I think this is a more generalized problem for humans. The app I work with demanded some logging requirements like the library to use. But that was it, different parts by different teams ended up with all kinds of different behaviors. As for the AI side, this is something where I see our limited context sizes causing issues when developing architecture across multiple products.
  - bob1029 9mo ago
    > limited context sizes Context size isn't the issue. You cannot effectively leverage an infinite context if you had one anyways. The general solution is to recursively decompose the problem into smaller ones and solve them independently of each other, returning the results back up the stack. Recursion being the key here. A bunch of parallel agents on separate call stacks that don't block on their logical callees is a slop factory.
linuxftw 9mo ago
The prompts for this are pretty sparse. This could 100% be accomplished with better prompting. Even with the current prompts, it's likely I could complete the task with a follow up request specifying what it did correctly and incorrectly. In fact, this could probably be entirely automated with multiple agents checking each other.
NitpickLawyer 9mo ago
I'm always interested in new benchmarks, so this is cool. I only had a brief look at [1] and [2], a few quick things that I noticed: For [1]: instruction.md is very brief, quite vague and "assumes" a lot of things. - Your task is: Add OTEL tracing to all microservices. Add OTEL logging to all microservices. (this is good) - 6.I want to know if the microservice has OTEL instrumentation and where the data is being sent. (??? i have no idea what this means) - 9.Use the recent version of the OTEL SDK. (yeah, this won't work unless you also use an MCP like context7 or provide local docs) What's weird here is that instruct.md has 0 content regarding conventions, specifically how to name things. Yet in tests_outputs you have this "expected_patterns = ["order", "stock", "gateway"]" and you assert on it. I guess that makes some sense, but being specific in the task.md is a must. Otherwise you're benching assumptions, and those don't even work with meatbags :) For [2]: instruction.md is more detailed, but has some weird issues: - "You should only be very minimal and instrument only the critical calls like request handlers without adding spans for business calls \n The goal is to get business kind of transaction" (??? this is confusing, even skipping over the weird grammar there) - "Draw ascii trace diagram into /workdir/traces.txt" (????) - "When modifying Python files, use Python itself to write files or use sed for targeted changes" (? why are you giving it harness-specific instructions in your instruct.md? this is so dependent on the agentic loop used, that it makes no sense here. - "Success Criteria: Demonstrate proper distributed tracing \n Include essential operations without over-instrumenting (keep it focused) \n Link operations correctly \n Analyze the code to determine which operations are essential to trace and how they relate to each other. (i mean ... yes and no. these are not success criteria IMO. It's like saying "do good on task not do bad". This could definitely be improved.) ---- Also, I noticed that every folder has a summary_claude... that looks like a claude written summary over a run. I hope that's not what's used in actually computing the benchmark scores. In that case, you're adding another layer of uncertainty in checking the results... The ideea is nice, but tbf some of the tests seem contrived, your instructions are not that clear, you expect static naming values while not providing instructions at all about naming conventions, and so on. It feels like a lot of this was "rushed"? I peaked a bit at the commit history and saw some mentions of vibe-coding a viewer for this. I hope that's the only thing that was vibe-coded :) [1] - https://github.com/QuesmaOrg/otel-bench/tree/main/datasets/otel/python-microservices https://github.com/QuesmaOrg/otel-bench/tree/main/datasets/o... [2] - https://github.com/QuesmaOrg/otel-bench/blob/main/datasets/otel/python-distributed-context-propagation https://github.com/QuesmaOrg/otel-bench/blob/main/datasets/o...
smithclay 9mo ago
We need more rigorous benchmarks for SRE tasks, which is much easier said that done. The only other benchmark I've come across is https://sreben.ch/ https://sreben.ch/ ... certainly there must be others by now?
- nyellin 9mo ago
  We publish the benchmarks for HolmesGPT (CNCF sandbox project) at https://holmesgpt.dev/development/evaluations/ https://holmesgpt.dev/development/evaluations/
heliumtera 9mo ago
Standard SRE tasks are bad benchmarks. First of all, familiarity with open telemetry apis is not knowledge, they are arbitrary constructs. We are implying that conforming to a standard is the only way, the right way. I would challenge that. Assuming models were good at this tasks, we could only conclude that this tasks were trivial AND sufficiently documented. Assuming they were good at this type of tasks (they can be trained to be good cheaply, we know that based on similar acquired capabilities) making a benchmark out of it would be less useful. But I am sure nobody really cares and the author just had to SEO a little bit regardless of reality
derfurth 9mo ago
In my experience the approach matters a lot, I recently implemented Otel with Claude Code in a medium sized ~200k loc project: - initially it wasn't working, plenty of parent/child relationships problems like described in the post - so I designed a thin a wrapper and used sealed classes for events instead of dynamic spans + some light documentation It took me like a day to implement tracing on the existing codebase, and for new features it works out of the box using the documentation. At the end of the day, leveraging typing + documentation dramatically constrains LLMs to do a better job
hakanderyal 9mo ago
Anyone that have spent serious time with agents know that you cannot expect out-of-the-box success without good context management, despite what the hyping crowd would claim. Have AI document the services first into a concise document. Then give it proper instructions about what you expect, along with the documentation created. Opus would pass that. We are not there yet, the agents are not ready to replace the driver.
- parliament32 9mo ago
  Sounds like it'd be faster to just do it yourself.
  - hakanderyal 9mo ago
    If you are not going all in with agents, yes, it would. On the other hand, the documentation & workflows need to be created only once. You need to invest a bit upfront to get positive RoI.
  - pixl97 9mo ago
    Until you have a whole team doing it differently because of no spec.
- vardalab 8mo ago
  Yep, I've been doing a lot of Ansible and Terraform automation with agents, and success has been continually updating our learnings, so to speak, capturing them in skills. It really does help in the long run. And it's gotten much smoother. Opus 4.5 was specifically almost like a step change and combined with decent skills, it has been effective in my homelab.
vachina 9mo ago
LLM is AI now, wow. Also LLM is a very advanced autocomplete algorithm. And autocomplete isn’t designed to write for you, you have to write first.
ripped_britches 9mo ago
Maybe I haven’t dug in enough, but why is the second GET request a different trace? Is it clicking a different result from same search? It’s possible that the requirements here are not clear, given that the instructions don’t detail how to handle such a situation and it’s not obvious to me as a human.
- fragmede 8mo ago
  Why wouldn't it be, it's a different request. If you've got an entire distributed system, the same GET request a millisecond later could get routed entirely differently, and succeed or fail. Even the caching layer is suspect.
srijanshukla18 9mo ago
Humans can't do much OTelBench Try finding even good documentation for it That's just misleading phrasing on this post I'm an SRE, AI does NOT struggle with 'simple SRE tasks' OTel instrumentation by no measure is a 'simple SRE task'
rapsacnz 9mo ago
I'd argue that this is just another reason not to use microservices.
esafak 9mo ago
This is a good idea. It makes sense that they would struggle because there is not much training data.
0xbadcafebee 9mo ago
Is it just me or is that prompt... not ideal? There's no concrete simple goals, no mention of testing, no loop. No description of the problem space or what success should look like. One-shot might work for this with frontier models, but they often need more for success. Saying "any SRE should be able to do this" is already problematic, because regardless of title, there are smarter people and dumber people. You're taking a gamble giving a human SRE this prompt. Whether it's AI or human, give it more context and instruction, or failure is likely. (And more importantly: use a loop so it can fix itself!) (also: SRE is too generic... there are a dozen kinds of SRE)
0xferruccio 9mo ago
To be fair I remember spending almost two weeks implementing OTel at my startup, the infrastructure as code setup of getting collectors running within a kubernetes cluster using terraform was a nightmare two years ago. I just kept running into issues, the docs were really poor and the configuration had endless options
elAhmo 9mo ago
Key is "for now".
benatkin 9mo ago
> AI SRE in 2026 is what DevOps Anomaly Detection was in 2015 — bold claims backed by huge marketing budgets, but lacking independent verification. There are stories of SaaS vendors abruptly killing the observability stack. Our results mirror ClickHouse’s findings: while LLMs can assist, they lack the capabilities of a skilled SRE. The key is LLMs can assist. It would be nice if they went farther into this, and seen how much more quickly a human that wrote a complex prompt, or went back and forth with a coding agent, could do the tasks compared to an unassisted human. I'm confident that it's at a level that already has profound implications for SRE. And the current level of getting it right with a simple prompt is still impressive.
mellosouls 9mo ago
Related discussion the other day: The future of software engineering is SRE (257 points, 139 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46759063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46759063
lenerdenator 9mo ago
This just reinforces the notion that if you don't have someone who at least roughly knows what they're doing giving a very detailed prompt and checking the output, you're wasting tokens. Plan mode is your friend.
jp57 9mo ago
Which have longer lifecycles, LLM model versions, or trends in SRE practices?
dirtytoken7 9mo ago
[dead]
nyellin 9mo ago
HolmesGPT maintainer here: our benchmarks [1] tell a very different story, as does anecdotal evidence from our customers- including Fortune 500 using SRE agents in incredibly complex production environments. We're actually struggling a bit with benchmark saturation right now. Opus does much better in the real world than Sonnet but it's hard to create sophisticated enough benchmarks to show that in the lab. When we run benchmarks with a small number of iterations Sonnet even wins sometimes. [1] https://holmesgpt.dev/development/evaluations/history/ https://holmesgpt.dev/development/evaluations/history/
jedberg 9mo ago
We've been experimenting with combining durable execution with debugging tasks, and it's working incredibly well! With the added context of actual execution data, defined by the developer as to which functions are important (instead of individual calls), it give the LLM the data it needs. I know there are AI SRE companies that have discovered the same -- that you can't just throw a bunch of data at a regular LLM and have it "do SRE things". It needs more structured context, and their value add is knowing what context and what structure is necessary.
dang 8mo ago
Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... (Submitted title was "OTelBench: AI struggles with simple SRE tasks (Opus 4.5 scores only 29%)")
- stared 8mo ago
  I am sorry for that. As a context, I felt that the original title (the first time I posted get a few upvotes, but not more). At the same time, I shouldn’t have editorialized it, as it is a slippery slope from „just a bit better title”, through optimization, to a clickbait. Thank you dang for keeping the spirit and quality of HN.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]

144 points by stared 9mo ago

whalesalad 9mo ago

If everyone else is the problem... maybe you are the problem. To me this says more about OTel than AI.

apercu 9mo ago
Can you help me understand where you are coming from? Is it that you think the benchmark is flawed or overly harsh? Or that you interpret the tone as blaming AI for failing a task that is inherently tricky or poorly specified? My takeaway was more "maybe AI coding assistants today aren’t yet good at this specific, realistic engineering task"....
- hobofan 9mo ago
  In my experience many OTEL libraries are aweful to use and most of the "official" ones are the worst offenders as the are largely codegened. That typically makes them feel clunky to use and they exhibit code patterns that are non-native to the language used, which would an explanation of why AI systems struggle with the benchmark. I think you would see similar results if tasking an AI to e.g. write GRPC/Protobuf systems using only the builtin/official protobuf codegen languages. Where I think the benchmark is quite fair is in the solutions. It looks like for each of the languages (at least the ones I'm familiar with), the "better" options were chosen, e.g. using `tracing-opentelemtry` rather than `opentelemetry-sdk` directly in Rust. However the one-shot nature of the benchmark also isn't that reflective of the actual utility. In my experience, if you have the initial framework setup done in your repo + a handful of examples, they do a great job of applying OTEL tracing to the majority of your project.
- pixl97 9mo ago
  Where I work we are looking at a lot of our documentation and implementations where AI has a hard time when doing it. This almost always correlates with customers having similar issues in getting things working. This has lead us to rewrite a lot of documentation to be more consistent and clear. In addition we set out series of examples from simple to complex. This shows as less tickets later, and more complex implementations being setup by customers without the need for support.
vimda 9mo ago
But not everyone else is the problem? OTel works fine for humans. Sometimes AIs are just shit
- devin 9mo ago
  It's not a new thing to bring up that OTel is difficult to get correct. This was a criticism levied before the AI era.
- heliumtera 9mo ago
  That is a wild claim my dude. Some of the comments here would challenge the claim that otel has worked pretty well for humans.

jcims 9mo ago

I've been building an 'sre agent' with LangGraph for the past couple of weeks and honestly I've been incredibly impressed with the ability for frontier models, when properly equipped with useful tools and context, to quickly diagnose issues and suggest reasonable steps to remediate. Primary tooling for me is access to source code, cicd environment and infrastructure control plane. Some cues in the context to inform basic conventions really helps. Even when it's not particularly effective, the additional information provided tends to be quite useful.

nsjdkdkdk 9mo ago
[dead]

dgxyz 9mo ago

Our humans struggle with them too. It’s the only domain where you need actually to know everything. I wouldn’t touch this with a pole if our MTTR was dependent on it being successful though.

vasco 9mo ago
I can say that as someone that does this for a job for a while, it's starting to be useful in many domains related to SRE that make parts of the job easier. MCP servers for monitoring tools are making our developers more competent at finding metrics and issues. It'll get there but nobody is going to type "fix my incident" in production and have a nice time today outside of the most simple things that if they are possible to fix like this, could've been automated already anyway. But between writing a runbook and automating sometimes takes time so those use cases will grow.

another_twist 9mo ago

[flagged]

asyncadventure 9mo ago

[dead]

jakozaur 9mo ago
In this benchmark, micro-services are really small, ~300 lines, and sometimes just two of them. More realistic tasks (large codebases, more microservices) would have a lower success rate.
- ndriscoll 9mo ago
  I'd expect it to actually do better in a large codebase. e.g. you'd already have an HTTP middleware stack, so it'd know that it can just add a layer to that for traces (and in fact there might already be off-the-shelf layers for whatever framework) vs. having to invent that on its own for the bare microservice.

winton 9mo ago

So if I try to do it with Opus three or four times, I'll get it done? And probably in about 10 minutes? Awesome

throwup238 9mo ago
That’s only if the failures are truly random and aren’t correlated
stared 9mo ago
Nope, these are no random dice rolls. Some times are solved each run, a few - occasionally (so here would be meaningful to try a few times - and metrics of pass@1 and pass@3 would be different), but most are never solved. See e.g.: https://quesma.com/benchmarks/otel/models/claude-opus-4.5/ https://quesma.com/benchmarks/otel/models/claude-opus-4.5/

AnotherGoodName 9mo ago

This is a little damning of the way Google does things honestly. >When an app runs on a single machine, you can often trace an error by scrolling through a log file. But when it runs across 50 microservices, that single request gets scattered into a chaotic firehose of disconnected events. Yep this is about Google. It's painful for humans to debug and it's also an extremely bespoke issue to deal with. No one else has quite the same level of clusterfuck and there's going to be no training for LLMs on this.

youknownothing 9mo ago
isn't that what trace IDs are for?
- belval 9mo ago
  Yeah I don't know their stack but I have a service that is a collection of microservices and Opus can debug them fine by aggregating the logs tied to the same faulty request ID. In general for those tasks though the question is more "How would a human do it". If it's impossible for a human because your tooling is so bad you can't even get the logs across services for a single ID, that seems like a pretty serious design issue. In general looking at the prompt though, this is also not very representative. You don't have an SOP that you can share with your agent? How do you expect new hires to onboard?
  - pixl97 9mo ago
    >How do you expect new hires to onboard? I've seen some places that pretty much say "Good luck, we hope you can swim. Life preserver not provided"
- pixl97 9mo ago
  Much like nested errors, management of trace IDs becomes difficult under scale as you will start getting multiple correlation references in complex systems.
tayo42 9mo ago

whynotminot 9mo ago

I would wager the main reason for this is the same reason it’s also hard to teach these skills to people: there’s not a lot of high quality training for distributed debugging of complex production issues. Competence comes from years of experience fighting fires. Very few people start their careers as SREs, it’s generally something they migrate into after enjoying it and showing aptitude for it. With that said, I wouldn’t expect this wall to hold up for too long. There has been a lot of low hanging fruit teaching models how to code. When that is saturated, the frontier companies will likely turn their attention to honing training environments for SRE style debug.

lysace 9mo ago
> With that said, I wouldn’t expect this wall to hold up for too long. The models are already so good at the traditionally hard stuff: collecting that insane amount of detailed knowledge across so many different domains, languages and software stacks.
heliumtera 9mo ago
There is definitely more to the inability for models to perform well at SRE. One, it is not engineering, it is next token prediction, it is vibes. They could do Site Reliability Vibing or something like that. When we ask it to generate an image, any image will do it. We couldn't care less. Try to sculpt it, try to rotate it 45 degrees and all hell breaks loose. The image would be rotated but the hair color could change as well. Pure vibes! When you ask it to refactor your code, any pattern would do it. You could rearrange the code in infinite ways, rename variables in infinite ways without fundamentally breaking logic. You could make as many arbitrary bullshit abstraction and call it good, as people have done it for years with OOP. It does not matter at all, any result would do it in this cases. When you want to hit an specific gRPC endpoint, you need an specific address and the method expects an specific contract to be honored. This either matches or it doesn't. When you wish the llms could implement a solution that captures specifics syscalls from specifics hosts and send traces to an specific platform, using an specific protocol, consolidating records on a specific bucket...you have one state that satisfy your needs and 100 requirement that needs to necessarily be fulfilled. It either meet all the requirements or it's no good. It truly is different from Vibing and llms will never be able to do in this. Maybe agents will, depending on the harnesses, on the systems in place, but one model just generate words words words with no care about nothing else

raincole 9mo ago

Original title: Benchmarking OpenTelemetry: Can AI trace your failed login? HN Editorialized: OTelBench: AI struggles with simple SRE tasks (Opus 4.5 scores only 29%) The task: > Your task is: Add OTEL tracing to all microservices. > Requirements: > Instrumentation should match conventions and well-known good practices. > Instrumentation must match the business domain of the microservices. > Traces must be sent to the endpoint defined by a standard OTEL environment variable. > Use the recent version of the OTEL SDK. I really don't think anything involved with multiple microservices can be called 'simple' even to humans. Perhaps to an expert who knows the specific business's domain knowledge it is.

pixl97 9mo ago
As someone whos job is support more than SWE, I agree with this. I've had to work in systems where events didn't share correlation IDs, I had to go in and filter entries down to microseconds to get a small enough number of entries that I could trace what actually happened between a set of services. From what I've seen in the enterprise software side of the world is a lot of companies are particularly bad at SRE and there isn't a great amount of standardization.
- formerly_proven 9mo ago
  Top 20 company globally by revenue Enterprise app observability is purely a responsibility of each individual application/project manager. There is virtually no standardization or even shared infra, a team just stuffing plaintext logs into an unconfigured elasticsearch instance is probably above median already. There is no visibility for anything across departments and more often that not, not even across apps in a department.
chaps 9mo ago
Having done app support across many environments, um - yes, multiple microservices is usually pretty simple. Just look at the open file/network handles and go from there. It's absolutely maddening to watch these models flail in trying to do something basic as, "check if the port is open" or "check if the process is running... and don't kill firefox this time". These aren't challenging things to do for an experienced human at all. But it's such a huge pain point for these models! It's hard for me to wrap my head around how these models can write surprisingly excellent code but fail down in these sorts of relatively simple troubleshooting paths.

yomismoaqui 9mo ago

I'm a human with 20+ years of experience and making OTEL work on Go was painful. It made me remember when I was working on the J2EE ecosystem shudder

the_duke 9mo ago

This is very confusingly written. From the post I expected that the tasks were about analysing traces, but all the tasks in the repository are about adding instrumentation to code! Some of the instructions don't give any guidance how to do it, some specify which libraries to use. "Use standard OTEL patterns" ... that's about as useful as saying "go write some code". There are a lot of ways to do instrumentation.... I'd be very curious HOW exactly the models fail. Are the test sets just incredibly specific about what output they except, and you get a lot of failures because of tiny subtle mismatches? Or do they just get the instrumentation categorically wrong? Also important: do the models have access to a web search tool to read the library docs? Otel libraries are often complicated to use... without reading latest docs or source code this would be quite tricky. Some models have gotten better at adding dependencies, installing them and then reading the code from the respective directory where dependencies get stored, but many don't do well with this. All in all, I'm very skeptical that this is very useful as a benchmark as is. I'd be much more interested in tasks like: Here are trace/log outputs , here is the source code, find and fix the bug.

pixl97 9mo ago
>Some of the instructions don't give any guidance how to do it, some specify which libraries to use. In supporting a piece of cloud software with a lot of microservices I think this is a more generalized problem for humans. The app I work with demanded some logging requirements like the library to use. But that was it, different parts by different teams ended up with all kinds of different behaviors. As for the AI side, this is something where I see our limited context sizes causing issues when developing architecture across multiple products.
- bob1029 9mo ago
  > limited context sizes Context size isn't the issue. You cannot effectively leverage an infinite context if you had one anyways. The general solution is to recursively decompose the problem into smaller ones and solve them independently of each other, returning the results back up the stack. Recursion being the key here. A bunch of parallel agents on separate call stacks that don't block on their logical callees is a slop factory.

linuxftw 9mo ago

The prompts for this are pretty sparse. This could 100% be accomplished with better prompting. Even with the current prompts, it's likely I could complete the task with a follow up request specifying what it did correctly and incorrectly. In fact, this could probably be entirely automated with multiple agents checking each other.

NitpickLawyer 9mo ago

I'm always interested in new benchmarks, so this is cool. I only had a brief look at [1] and [2], a few quick things that I noticed: For [1]: instruction.md is very brief, quite vague and "assumes" a lot of things. - Your task is: Add OTEL tracing to all microservices. Add OTEL logging to all microservices. (this is good) - 6.I want to know if the microservice has OTEL instrumentation and where the data is being sent. (??? i have no idea what this means) - 9.Use the recent version of the OTEL SDK. (yeah, this won't work unless you also use an MCP like context7 or provide local docs) What's weird here is that instruct.md has 0 content regarding conventions, specifically how to name things. Yet in tests_outputs you have this "expected_patterns = ["order", "stock", "gateway"]" and you assert on it. I guess that makes some sense, but being specific in the task.md is a must. Otherwise you're benching assumptions, and those don't even work with meatbags :) For [2]: instruction.md is more detailed, but has some weird issues: - "You should only be very minimal and instrument only the critical calls like request handlers without adding spans for business calls \n The goal is to get business kind of transaction" (??? this is confusing, even skipping over the weird grammar there) - "Draw ascii trace diagram into /workdir/traces.txt" (????) - "When modifying Python files, use Python itself to write files or use sed for targeted changes" (? why are you giving it harness-specific instructions in your instruct.md? this is so dependent on the agentic loop used, that it makes no sense here. - "Success Criteria: Demonstrate proper distributed tracing \n Include essential operations without over-instrumenting (keep it focused) \n Link operations correctly \n Analyze the code to determine which operations are essential to trace and how they relate to each other. (i mean ... yes and no. these are not success criteria IMO. It's like saying "do good on task not do bad". This could definitely be improved.) ---- Also, I noticed that every folder has a summary_claude... that looks like a claude written summary over a run. I hope that's not what's used in actually computing the benchmark scores. In that case, you're adding another layer of uncertainty in checking the results... The ideea is nice, but tbf some of the tests seem contrived, your instructions are not that clear, you expect static naming values while not providing instructions at all about naming conventions, and so on. It feels like a lot of this was "rushed"? I peaked a bit at the commit history and saw some mentions of vibe-coding a viewer for this. I hope that's the only thing that was vibe-coded :) [1] - https://github.com/QuesmaOrg/otel-bench/tree/main/datasets/otel/python-microservices https://github.com/QuesmaOrg/otel-bench/tree/main/datasets/o... [2] - https://github.com/QuesmaOrg/otel-bench/blob/main/datasets/otel/python-distributed-context-propagation https://github.com/QuesmaOrg/otel-bench/blob/main/datasets/o...

smithclay 9mo ago

We need more rigorous benchmarks for SRE tasks, which is much easier said that done. The only other benchmark I've come across is https://sreben.ch/ https://sreben.ch/ ... certainly there must be others by now?

nyellin 9mo ago
We publish the benchmarks for HolmesGPT (CNCF sandbox project) at https://holmesgpt.dev/development/evaluations/ https://holmesgpt.dev/development/evaluations/

heliumtera 9mo ago

Standard SRE tasks are bad benchmarks. First of all, familiarity with open telemetry apis is not knowledge, they are arbitrary constructs. We are implying that conforming to a standard is the only way, the right way. I would challenge that. Assuming models were good at this tasks, we could only conclude that this tasks were trivial AND sufficiently documented. Assuming they were good at this type of tasks (they can be trained to be good cheaply, we know that based on similar acquired capabilities) making a benchmark out of it would be less useful. But I am sure nobody really cares and the author just had to SEO a little bit regardless of reality

derfurth 9mo ago

In my experience the approach matters a lot, I recently implemented Otel with Claude Code in a medium sized ~200k loc project: - initially it wasn't working, plenty of parent/child relationships problems like described in the post - so I designed a thin a wrapper and used sealed classes for events instead of dynamic spans + some light documentation It took me like a day to implement tracing on the existing codebase, and for new features it works out of the box using the documentation. At the end of the day, leveraging typing + documentation dramatically constrains LLMs to do a better job

hakanderyal 9mo ago

Anyone that have spent serious time with agents know that you cannot expect out-of-the-box success without good context management, despite what the hyping crowd would claim. Have AI document the services first into a concise document. Then give it proper instructions about what you expect, along with the documentation created. Opus would pass that. We are not there yet, the agents are not ready to replace the driver.

parliament32 9mo ago
Sounds like it'd be faster to just do it yourself.
- hakanderyal 9mo ago
  If you are not going all in with agents, yes, it would. On the other hand, the documentation & workflows need to be created only once. You need to invest a bit upfront to get positive RoI.
- pixl97 9mo ago
  Until you have a whole team doing it differently because of no spec.
vardalab 8mo ago
Yep, I've been doing a lot of Ansible and Terraform automation with agents, and success has been continually updating our learnings, so to speak, capturing them in skills. It really does help in the long run. And it's gotten much smoother. Opus 4.5 was specifically almost like a step change and combined with decent skills, it has been effective in my homelab.

vachina 9mo ago

LLM is AI now, wow. Also LLM is a very advanced autocomplete algorithm. And autocomplete isn’t designed to write for you, you have to write first.

ripped_britches 9mo ago

Maybe I haven’t dug in enough, but why is the second GET request a different trace? Is it clicking a different result from same search? It’s possible that the requirements here are not clear, given that the instructions don’t detail how to handle such a situation and it’s not obvious to me as a human.

fragmede 8mo ago
Why wouldn't it be, it's a different request. If you've got an entire distributed system, the same GET request a millisecond later could get routed entirely differently, and succeed or fail. Even the caching layer is suspect.

srijanshukla18 9mo ago

Humans can't do much OTelBench Try finding even good documentation for it That's just misleading phrasing on this post I'm an SRE, AI does NOT struggle with 'simple SRE tasks' OTel instrumentation by no measure is a 'simple SRE task'

rapsacnz 9mo ago

I'd argue that this is just another reason not to use microservices.

esafak 9mo ago

This is a good idea. It makes sense that they would struggle because there is not much training data.

0xbadcafebee 9mo ago

Is it just me or is that prompt... not ideal? There's no concrete simple goals, no mention of testing, no loop. No description of the problem space or what success should look like. One-shot might work for this with frontier models, but they often need more for success. Saying "any SRE should be able to do this" is already problematic, because regardless of title, there are smarter people and dumber people. You're taking a gamble giving a human SRE this prompt. Whether it's AI or human, give it more context and instruction, or failure is likely. (And more importantly: use a loop so it can fix itself!) (also: SRE is too generic... there are a dozen kinds of SRE)

0xferruccio 9mo ago

To be fair I remember spending almost two weeks implementing OTel at my startup, the infrastructure as code setup of getting collectors running within a kubernetes cluster using terraform was a nightmare two years ago. I just kept running into issues, the docs were really poor and the configuration had endless options

elAhmo 9mo ago

Key is "for now".

benatkin 9mo ago

> AI SRE in 2026 is what DevOps Anomaly Detection was in 2015 — bold claims backed by huge marketing budgets, but lacking independent verification. There are stories of SaaS vendors abruptly killing the observability stack. Our results mirror ClickHouse’s findings: while LLMs can assist, they lack the capabilities of a skilled SRE. The key is LLMs can assist. It would be nice if they went farther into this, and seen how much more quickly a human that wrote a complex prompt, or went back and forth with a coding agent, could do the tasks compared to an unassisted human. I'm confident that it's at a level that already has profound implications for SRE. And the current level of getting it right with a simple prompt is still impressive.

mellosouls 9mo ago

Related discussion the other day: The future of software engineering is SRE (257 points, 139 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46759063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46759063

lenerdenator 9mo ago

This just reinforces the notion that if you don't have someone who at least roughly knows what they're doing giving a very detailed prompt and checking the output, you're wasting tokens. Plan mode is your friend.

jp57 9mo ago

Which have longer lifecycles, LLM model versions, or trends in SRE practices?

dirtytoken7 9mo ago

[dead]

nyellin 9mo ago

HolmesGPT maintainer here: our benchmarks [1] tell a very different story, as does anecdotal evidence from our customers- including Fortune 500 using SRE agents in incredibly complex production environments. We're actually struggling a bit with benchmark saturation right now. Opus does much better in the real world than Sonnet but it's hard to create sophisticated enough benchmarks to show that in the lab. When we run benchmarks with a small number of iterations Sonnet even wins sometimes. [1] https://holmesgpt.dev/development/evaluations/history/ https://holmesgpt.dev/development/evaluations/history/

jedberg 9mo ago

We've been experimenting with combining durable execution with debugging tasks, and it's working incredibly well! With the added context of actual execution data, defined by the developer as to which functions are important (instead of individual calls), it give the LLM the data it needs. I know there are AI SRE companies that have discovered the same -- that you can't just throw a bunch of data at a regular LLM and have it "do SRE things". It needs more structured context, and their value add is knowing what context and what structure is necessary.

dang 8mo ago

Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22level%20playing%20field%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... (Submitted title was "OTelBench: AI struggles with simple SRE tasks (Opus 4.5 scores only 29%)")

stared 8mo ago
I am sorry for that. As a context, I felt that the original title (the first time I posted get a few upvotes, but not more). At the same time, I shouldn’t have editorialized it, as it is a slippery slope from „just a bit better title”, through optimization, to a clickbait. Thank you dang for keeping the spirit and quality of HN.
- deleted 8mo ago
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