aws-otel-lambda VS opentelemetry-lambda

OpenTelemetry is being pushed as a replacement for AWS X-Ray SDKs by AWS, but it's in such a broken state for Lambda right now. A 200-500% performance penalty for using it is insane[1][2].

[1]: https://github.com/aws-observability/aws-otel-lambda/issues/...

The documentation for Lambda gives example code for the different languages. To shorten the long way from example code to running code, I will show you ready-to-run CDK code for Python, Node and GO with a serverless architecture. With Lambda, we are using the AWS X-Ray exporter in the collector. If you want to build your own layer, clone the repo AWS-managed OpenTelemetry Lambda Layers. To do that, learn GO here. You might know the creator of the site 😉 .

Sorry you're having trouble working with the ADOT Lambda Layers :(. Have you had a chance to open an issue on the GitHub repo for OTel Lambda or ADOT Lambda? You should add your expected vs your actual output!

Shimmer is a monkeypatching library that a telemetry extension for AWS Lambda was using.

I mean, sure, you can improve performance a bit by increasing the RAM/compute capacity on the Lambda. But it always adds a pretty steep overhead right now, no matter how much capacity you throw at it.

https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-lambda/issue...

https://github.com/aws-observability/aws-otel-lambda/issues/...

OpenTelemetry AWS Lambda repository

With the sample apps from the opentelemetry-lambda repository the Lambda part itself was easy to implement. What took me some time was to provide the jaeger Fargate service with IaC ouside of an k8s environment. But with ECS and ServiceDiscovery that was easy in the end. This should be even more simple in an EKS environment with the jaegertracing helm-charts.

OpenTelemetry recently released https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-lambda, but they also have this in the official docs https://opentelemetry.io/docs/instrumentation/js/serverless/. What do you consider to be the better option?

opentelemetry-lambda

You don’t have to create an opentelemetry configuration file such as this for each of your lambdas. In fact, you shouldn’t. In AWS, you can use Lambda Layers. You can define the OpenTelemetry tracing piece of code as a Lambda layer and use it in any Lambda you want. Furthermore, OpenTelemetry went ahead and implemented this opentelemetry-lambda layer for us. All we need to do is use it with our config.

Sorry you're having trouble working with the ADOT Lambda Layers :(. Have you had a chance to open an issue on the GitHub repo for OTel Lambda or ADOT Lambda? You should add your expected vs your actual output!