opentelemetry-go VS opentelemetry-collector-contrib

Our first approach was to implement a separate SDK for each independent technology stack. We decided to use OpenTelemetry which is widely adopted and covers most of our needs.

Distributed system administrators need mechanisms and tools for monitoring individual nodes in order to analyze the system and promptly detect anomalies. Developers also need effective mechanisms for analyzing, diagnosing issues, and identifying bugs in protocol implementations. Logging, tracing, and collecting metrics are common observability techniques to allow monitoring and obtaining diagnostic information from the system; most of the explored code bases use these techniques. OpenTelemetry and Prometheus are popular open-source monitoring solutions, which are used in many of the explored code bases.

OpenTelemetry

When choosing distributed tracing tools, considerations include your technology stack, business requirements, and monitoring complexity. Zipkin, SkyWalking, and OpenTelemetry are popular distributed tracing solutions, each with its unique features.

You can follow this process with any large token AI system like Claude by identifying tracing data relevant to the code you are working on, using it as context to prompt OpenAI or other LLMs. Generally, you’d generate tracing data by implementing OpenTelemetry (aka OTEL) libraries into your application, adding spans to your functions with Jaeger, or using commercial SaaS tools like Honeycomb and Datadog.

While many programming languages provide robust support for Open Telemetry, this instance focuses on Golang. It's important to note that, in the current context, the logs SDK for Golang is not implemented. For future reference consult the list of supported languages and explore the Open Telemetry repositories. Always prioritize the main repository and its contrib repository, housing extensions and instrumentation libraries crucial to the Open Telemetry framework. Stay updated with the latest developments to ensure seamless integration and enhanced functionality.

OneUptime (https://github.com/oneuptime/oneuptime) is the open-source alternative to DataDog. It's 100% free and you can self-host it on your VM / server / cloud or you can use SaaS at https://oneuptime.com

NEW UPDATES (since we last posted to HN): We now support OpenTelemetry (https://opentelemetry.io/) natively which will help you to monitor, observe and debug any app, service, database or stack.

OpenTelemetry is the fastest growing Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project. It standardizes the instrumentation and collection of traces, metrics, and logs from applications, and is supported by all the major observability projects, languages, and tools. One standard to rule them all!

OpenTelemetry is a collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs. Use it to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data (metrics, logs, and traces) to help you analyze your software’s performance and behavior. https://opentelemetry.io/

Tracetest uses your existing OpenTelemetry traces to power trace-based testing with assertions against your trace data at every point of the request transaction. You only need to point Tracetest to your existing trace data source, or send traces to Tracetest directly!

The open telemetry collector does just that. https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-co...

There are two official distributions of the OpenTelemetry Collector: Core, and Contrib.

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.

Thanks for the reply. Would the Spotlight sidecar possibly be able to run independently and consume spans emitted by the Sentry exporter[0] or some other similar flow beyond strictly exporting directly from the Sentry SDK provided by Spotlight?

This tooling looks really cool and I'd love to play around with it, but am already pretty entrenched into OTel and funneling data through the collector and don't want to introduce too much additional overhead for devs.

[0] https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-co...

A list of all metric definitions can be found here.

receivers: otlp: protocols: grpc: endpoint: 0.0.0.0:4317 http: endpoint: 0.0.0.0:4318 hostmetrics: collection_interval: 60s scrapers: cpu: {} disk: {} load: {} filesystem: {} memory: {} network: {} paging: {} process: mute_process_name_error: true mute_process_exe_error: true mute_process_io_error: true processes: {} prometheus: config: global: scrape_interval: 60s scrape_configs: - job_name: otel-collector-binary scrape_interval: 60s static_configs: - targets: ["localhost:8889>"] - job_name: "jvm-metrics" scrape_interval: 10s metrics_path: "/actuator/prometheus" static_configs: - targets: ["localhost:8090>"] processors: batch: send_batch_size: 1000 timeout: 10s # Ref: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib/blob/main/processor/resourcedetectionprocessor/README.md resourcedetection: detectors: [env, system] # Before system detector, include ec2 for AWS, gcp for GCP and azure for Azure. # Using OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES envvar, env detector adds custom labels. timeout: 2s system: hostname_sources: [os] # alternatively, use [dns,os] for setting FQDN as host.name and os as fallback extensions: health_check: {} zpages: {} exporters: otlp: endpoint: "ingest.{region}.signoz.cloud:443" tls: insecure: false headers: "signoz-access-token": logging: verbosity: normal service: telemetry: metrics: address: 0.0.0.0:8888 extensions: [health_check, zpages] pipelines: metrics: receivers: [otlp] processors: [batch] exporters: [otlp] metrics/internal: receivers: [prometheus, hostmetrics] processors: [resourcedetection, batch] exporters: [otlp] traces: receivers: [otlp] processors: [batch] exporters: [otlp] logs: receivers: [otlp] processors: [batch] exporters: [otlp]

If you are using the prometheus exporter, you can use the transform processor to get specific resource attributes into metric labels.

With the advantage that you get only the specific attributes you want, thus avoiding a cardinality explosion.

https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-co...

OpenTelemetry Operators