hyperdx VS opentelemetry-specification

Hi HN, Mike and Warren here! We’ve been building an open source local-dev-friendly mode for HyperDX (hyperdx.io). It's a single Docker container that lets you view logs, metrics, and traces for local development in a similar way you can use them for production (live tail, filter/correlate logs & spans, build charts, flamegraph, etc.) Basically, imagine you can run Datadog in a single container for local development. We does this by spinning up an OpenTelemetry collector, Clickhouse DB and HyperDX UI all in a single container - it only takes a few seconds to start and lets you start live tailing your local logs and traces immediately (and graph metrics of course).

README (w/ demo gif): https://github.com/hyperdxio/hyperdx/blob/main/LOCAL.md

We started building local mode as it became one of our most loved [1] community issue after sharing HyperDX. It made sense - as we constantly use HyperDX to debug our own issues locally, and have found it to be a huge productivity boost for things like…

1. Tailing multiple container logs (and grepping/isolating them) without a ton of different terminal splits open at the same time.

2. Be able to sensibly view structured logs and correlated traces to debug local issues (because you’re using structured logging and tracing right?) instead of adding ad-hoc console statements that print out exactly what I could’ve gotten from tracing.

3. Testing telemetry are actually emitting/correlating as expected, before shipping it all the way out to prod and realizing I accidentally created a very expensive high-cardinality metric or a span that has the wrong properties.

We spent some time packaging & tuning our existing OSS stack to run in a single container with less memory/space requirements by staring at `dive` to slim down the image and applied incantations from documentation until memory usage improved. Additionally we removed a few non-local-friendly things like authentication requirements and extraneous services.

It still has all the goodness you’d want - so you can full text search your logs/traces, live tail all your events, view spans correlated with logs (and vice versa), create dashboards based on logs, metrics, traces, and is fully OpenTelemetry compatible - just point your Otel SDK/collector to http://localhost:4318 (or 4317 for the grpc folks) and you’re already good to go.

I’m excited to share what we’ve been working on and would love to hear your feedback and opinions!

Spin up the container yourself to try it out:

docker run -p 8000:8000 -p 4318:4318 -p 4317:4317 -p 8080:8080 -p 8002:8002 hyperdx/hyperdx-local

Main Open Source Repo: https://github.com/hyperdxio/hyperdx

Hosted Demo (in case you want to play around in a cloud sandbox instead): https://api.hyperdx.io/login/demo

HyperDX Landing Page: https://hyperdx.io

[1]: https://github.com/hyperdxio/hyperdx/issues/7

ClickHouse also excels at storing and querying semi-structured data, like event logs. Previously, many engineering teams used Elasticsearch in a similar niche to ClickHouse, building applications like Kibana. Increasingly, developers are choosing ClickHouse over Elasticsearch for its unparalleled performance characteristics. For example, our friends at hyperdx.io are using ClickHouse to build an open-source OpenTelemetry provider!

HyperDX

Biased as a founder in the space [1] but I think with OpenTelemetry + OSS extensible observability tooling, the holy grail of one tool is more realizable than ever.

Vendor lock in with Otel now is hopefully a thing of the past - but now that more obs solutions are going open source, hopefully it's not necessarily true that one tool would be mediocre over all use cases (since DD and the likes are inherently limited by their own engineering teams, vs OSS products can have community/customer contributions to improve the surface area over time on top of the core maintainer's work).

[1] https://github.com/hyperdxio/hyperdx

HyperDX (YC S22) | Founding Engineer | SF Bay Area HQ | REMOTE

We're building an open source, dev friendly observability tool (think Datadog, but something developers actually love to use and companies can actually afford).

We're in the intersection of needing to build rock solid infrastructure ingesting TBs of data, searching it incredibly quickly and scalably, and layering on top a buttery smooth DX from our language-specific SDKs, APIs and web app.

We're super early and hiring our first founding engineer. We already have a cloud product customers pay for and love, loads of runway regardless of the wider economy, 5k+ Github stars weeks after our OSS launch, and tons of hard technical problems.

The vast majority of our work is open source, so you can get a sense of what you'd be working with here: https://github.com/hyperdxio/hyperdx

Our job listing is here as well: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/hyperdx/jobs/zFXTbzl-f...

Come by our discord as well if you just want to talk shop: https://discord.gg/FErRRKU78j

I'm Mike, one of the cofounders. If you love shipping quickly and want to help us build from the ground up an open source developer tool (that devs won't hate when they're on-call), let me know! mike [at] hyperdx.io

Oh huh! What would you do with span start independent of stops?

A tangent on logcat - local observability to me is a really intriguing area, I think there's a story of Otel for local as well if someone can build a good enough local DX for consuming them (we've been told a number of times about this https://github.com/hyperdxio/hyperdx/issues/7 as an example)

Hi HN, Mike and Warren here! We’ve been building HyperDX (hyperdx.io). HyperDX allows you to easily search and correlate logs, traces, metrics (alpha), and session replays all in one place. For example, if a user reports a bug “this button doesn’t work," an engineer can play back what the user was doing in their browser and trace API calls back to the backend logs for that specific request, all from a single view. Github Repo: https://github.com/hyperdxio/hyperdx

We're building the OSS equivalent when it comes to the observability side of Splunk/DD, on Clickhouse naturally of course but believe in the same end goal of lowering cost via separation of compute and storage.

https://github.com/hyperdxio/hyperdx

It means that the OpenTelemetry project provides not only a specification to define the contract between the applications, collectors, and telemetry databases, but also a set of APIs, SDKs, and tools like instrumentation libraries (for different languages), collectors, operators, etc. OpenTelemetry is open-source and vendor-agnostic, so the project is not tied to any specific vendor or cloud provider.

Sure, happy to provide more specifics!

Our main issue was the lack of a synchronous gauge. The officially supported asynchronous API of registering a callback function to report a gauge metric is very different from how we were doing things before, and would have required lots of refactoring of our code. Instead, we wrote a wrapper that exposes a synchronous-like API: https://gist.github.com/yolken-airplane/027867b753840f7d15d6....

It seems like this is a common feature request across many of the SDKs, and it's in the process of being fixed in some of them (https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specificatio...)? I'm not sure what the plans are for the golang SDK specifically.

Another, more minor issue, is the lack of support for "constant" attributes that are applied to all metrics. We use these to identify the app, among other use cases, so we added wrappers around the various "Add", "Record", "Observe", etc. calls that automatically add these. (It's totally possible that this is supported and I missed it, in which case please let me know!).

Overall, the SDK was generally well-written and well-documented, we just needed some extra work to make the interfaces more similar to the ones were were using before.

OpenTelemetry is an open-source collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs that aims to standardize the way we generate and collect telemetry data. It follows a specification-driven development. The OpenTelemetry specification  has design and implementation guidelines for how the instrumentation libraries should be implemented. In addition, it provides client libraries in all the major programming languages that follow the specification.

Two problems with OpenTelemetry:

1. It doesn't know what the hell it is. Is it a semantic standard? Is a protocol? It is a facade? What layer of abstraction does it provide? Answer: All of the above! All the things! All the layers!

2. No one from OpenTelemetry has actually tried instrumenting a library. And if they have, they haven't the first suggestion on how instrumenters should actually use metrics, traces, and logs. Do you write to all three? To one? I asked this question two years ago, not a single response. [1]

[1] https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specificatio...

OpenTelemetry Specification GitHub

One update to this: we proposed replacing the count suffix in OpenTelemetry with total to match Prometheus/OpenMetrics. That discussion resulted in the count suffix being removed from the OpenTelemetry semantic conventions. We'll soon update our metric from being called function.calls.count to just function.calls and the generated Prometheus queries will refer to function_calls_total. That resolves one of the main conflicts between the two specs.

This is your best bet if you want to track status updates: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/issues/2911

OpenTelemetry is a standard for implementing telemetry in your applications. It provides a specification, containing the requirements that all implementations should follow as well as some implementations for major languages, including an API and a SDK to interact with it.

At this point, we are about to do the real work where we have to configure OpenTelemetry and export telemetry data to New Relic. Exporting this kind of data relies on a specific protocol; the OpenTelemetry Protocol or OTLP.

OpenTelemetry provides instrumentation libraries for your application. The development of these libraries is guided by the OpenTelemetry specification. The OpenTelemetry specification describes the cross-language requirements and design expectations for all OpenTelemetry implementations in various programming languages.