opentelemetry-examples VS pyroscope

We focused on the observability ecosystem and took the time to interact with our friends from Lightstep, New Relic, Honeycomb, Dynatrace, Instana, and many more. With that in mind, keep an eye out for more integrations coming to Tracetest!

Lightstep bills itself as a platform for the reliability of cloud-native applications. The people behind Lightstep co-founded OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing, which gives them a unique perspective on the use cases of distributed tracing and the value of having a vendor-neutral tracing data format.

In the last 5 to 10 years, new Observability vendors have entered the market, including Honeycomb, Instana, Lightstep and Datadog. Similarly, traditional APM vendors such as Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic, as well as SIEM (and log management) vendors such as Splunk and Sumo Logic, have joined them in the Observability space too. Finally you also have major cloud providers such as AWS with their own observability solution. Each of them is attempting to address the observability issues that modern architecture presents by using Logs, Metrics, Traces, and Events.

I spent Day 2 at the Colony Club to attend OTel Unplugged. This event was sponsored by Lightstep, Honeycomb, New Relic, Splunk, Dynatrace, Crowdstrike, and NGINX. I came into the event not knowing what to expect. I can sometimes clamp up when I’m around folks that I don’t know, but because I was helping with the event check-in, I got to say hello to a number of the attendees, which helped break the ice. And it turns out that there were a lot of names that I recognized from my work in the OTel community, and it was nice to connect in person with folks whom I’d only previously met through Slack or Zoom.

The example in this tutorial can be found in the lightstep/opentelemetry-examples repo. We will be working with three main files:

Note how we don’t have to set a LS_ACCESS_TOKEN, since that’s already configured in the Collector’s config.yml file. Just make sure that you have a running OTel Collector instance!

Note: If you’re looking for full code listings, don’t panic! You see them in the Lightstep OTel examples repository.

What do you mean? pyroscope.io was slow for you? or the blog?

Tries (or prefix trees).

We use them a lot at Pyroscope for compressing strings that have common prefixes. They are also used in databases (e.g indexes in Mongo) or file formats (e.g debug symbols in macOS/iOS Mach-O format are compressed using tries).

We have an article with some animations that go into details about tries in case anyone's interested [0].

[0] https://github.com/pyroscope-io/pyroscope/blob/main/docs/sto...

You could use continuous profiling with Pyroscope which uses async-profiler under the hood, but with the added functionality that you can add relevant tags to your VMs (example).

Java Flight Recorder (JFR) is a format for collecting diagnostic and profiling data from Java applications. A while back someone created an issue for Pyroscope , an open source continuous profiler written in Go, to support ingesting profiles in JFR format, but there were no existing parsers that were also written in Go.

This cloud version is actually a slimmed-down version of Pyroscope which is open source and so you can run it locally.

At Pyroscope (open source continuous profiling) we use flamegraphs extensively to visualize and analyze profiling data. However, one of the worst parts about using flamegraphs for analysis is that they are kind of annoying to share.