opentelemetry-collector VS opentelemetry-specification

But how does one monitor a Collector? The OTel Collector already emits metrics for the purposes of its own monitoring. These can then be sent to your Observability backend for monitoring.

Maybe, you are asking yourself: "But I already had instrumented my applications with vendor-specific libraries and I'm using their agents and monitoring tools, why should I change to OpenTelemetry?". The answer is: maybe you're right and I don't want to encourage you to update the way how you are doing observability in your applications, that's a hard and complex task. But, if you are starting from scratch or you are not happy with your current observability infrastructure, OpenTelemetry is the best choice, independently of the backend telemetry tool that you are using. I would like to invite you to take a look at the number of exporters available in the collector contrib section, if your backend tracing tool is not there, probably it's already using the Open Telemetry Protocol (OTLP) and you will be able to use the core collector. Otherwise, you should consider changing your backend telemetry tool or contributing to the project creating a new exporter.

To receive OTLP data, you set up the standard otlp receiver to receive data in HTTP or gRPC format. To forward traces and metrics, a batch processor was defined to accumulate data and send it every 100 milliseconds. Then set up a connection to Tempo (in otlp/tempo exporter, with a standard top exporter) and to Prometheus (in prometheus exporter, with a control exporter). A debug exporter also was added to log info on container standard I/O and see how the collector is working.

You can find more details on advanced configurations here.

> opentelemetry is basically a house of antipatterns

"Look on My Works Ye Mighty and Despair!"

https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector/tr... -> https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-re... ... and then a reasonable person trying to load that mess into their head may ask 'err, what's the difference between go.opentelemetry.io/collector and github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib?'

  $ curl -fsS go.opentelemetry.io/collector | grep go-import

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector: OpenTelemetry Collector (github.com)

There are 2 collector types: the core and the contrib. I have used the contrib as it features the splunk_hec exporter.

We are setting the deployment to have exactly 1 replica and setting the container CPU and memory limits according to the minimum that was checked for performance in their docs.

Lightstep ingests data in native OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) format, so we will use the OTLP Exporter. The exporter can be called either otlp or follow the naming format otlp/. We could call it otlp/bob if we wanted to. We're calling our exporter otlp/ls to signal to us that we are using the OTLP exporter to send the data to Lightstep.

Then, we set up a batch processor that batches up the spans together and every 1 second sends the batch forward. In production, you would want more than 1 second, but I set this here to 1 second for instant feedback in Jaeger.

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.