opentelemetry-js VS opentelemetry-proto

JavaScript

> OpenTelemetry is a marketing-driven project, designed by committee, implemented naively and inefficiently, and guided by the primary goal of allowing Fortune X00 CTOs to tick off some boxes on their strategy roadmap documents.

I'm the founder of highlight.io. On the consumer side as a company, we've seen a lot of value of from OTEL; we've used it to build out language support for quite a few customers at this point, and the community is very receptive.

Here's an example of us putting up a change: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-js/pull/4049

Do you mind sharing why you think no-one should be using it? Some reasoning would be nice.

That's traces? I was wondering if I could use https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-js/tree/main...

Nothing like Faro for now. However, https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-js can be used to achieve the same result and OpenObserve has great support for Opentelemetry.

Can it be integrated with Grafana Faro or OpenTelemetry?

4. Register automatic instrumentations. For example, you can automatically trace all XHR requests, fetch requests, page loads, and user interactions. With distributed tracing, you should always prefer automatic instrumentation whenever possible to reduce maintenance and leverage existing conventions. The document load instrumentation allows you to treat the server as the parent span to a given page load, from which the client will then be the root span to everything in the server. This is an extremely powerful concept that allows traces to viewed from the perspective of the user, encapsulating all requests and user interactions in a single trace with no manual instrumentation!

We also trialed Sentry's APM tool (also marketed as a distributed tracing tool). While it had pretty charts, dashboards, niceties like core web vitals, and integrated well with Sentry's error product, its utility as a distributed tracing tool is significantly less powerful than tools like Honeycomb. You will end up using a large amount of your user's bandwidth sending telemetry data that can't fully be leveraged in the Sentry UI. When I last used (in April 2021), the spans of a given trace could only be viewed in a specific part the UI and they couldn't be searched for in queries or used in charts. I'm unsure if this has been updated. But this is not the worse part. Because Sentry uses its own data model for traces, it is not compatible with open source standards such as OpenTelemetry or OpenTracing! The sales team will not tell you this during the trial. This means our entire backend, which was already instrumented with OpenTracing, would now also need to instrument Sentry's tracing (...if they supported the language) in order to connect frontend traces to backend traces. Each team I met with their sales team, I said the same thing: support OpenTelemetry, otherwise you are asking for us to further isolate our backend and frontend teams.

It looks like they have heard this opinion, as they have recently published a blog post about the evolution of the distributed tracing API, citing incompatibility with OpenTelemetry due to their data model. It will require a very large change for them to support this. Meanwhile, OpenTelemetry can be used with any tracing vendor, a large number of languages, the other major instrumentation standards (OpenTracing, OpenCensus), and any trace propagation format.

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

Consumer lag will quickly show any functional or technical issue with your event stream. By using the code examples from this blogpost, you can avoid having to dive into the SDKs yourself. Of course, you can adopt the metric collection to send the metric to the logs or to another metrics system like prometheus, datadog, or open telemetry.

I would work on getting Open Telemetry pointed at an “all-in-one” Jaegar instance and move on from there: https://www.jaegertracing.io/docs/1.25/getting-started/ https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-js Various cloud providers may have a way to collect/view traces as well, but, Jaegar and the Open Telemetry Collector are the open source way to do that. The projects are in the process of converging in some ways — everything is in flux.

OpenTelemetry is a collection of open source tools, APIs, and SDKs for instrumenting, generating, and exporting telemetry data from running software. It provides language-specific implementations for most popular programming languages, including both browser JavaScript and Node.js.

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.

Here's the example payloads for OTLP over JSON and example of how to ingest them: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-proto/tree/m...

An OTLP receiver can receive data via gRPC or HTTP using the OTLP format. There are advanced configurations that you can enable via the YAML file.

Cerbos fully transitioned from OpenCensus to OpenTelemetry, a move that significantly boosts our metrics and tracing capabilities. This shift allows for more efficient integration with a variety of observability products supporting the OpenTelemetry protocol (OTLP) but also offers the flexibility to use push metrics and fine-tune trace sampling. With this update, configuration through the tracing block in Cerbos files is deprecated in favor of using OpenTelemetry environment variables.

Networking is Easy (Really!) Since you install the agent directly into the environment where you are running your application, there is no complex networking. When developing in localMode, the agent listens on the common OpenTelemetry Line Protocol (OTLP) on ports 4317 & 4318 automatically.

Oh nice, thank you (and also solumos) for the links! It looks like oteps/pull/171 (merged June 2023) expanded and superseded the opentelemetry-proto/pull/346 PR (closed Jul 2022) [0]. The former resulted in merging OpenTelemetry Enhancement Proposal 156 [1], with some interesting results especially for 'Phase 2' where they implemented columnar storage end-to-end (see the Validation section [2]):

* For univariate time series, OTel Arrow is 2 to 2.5 better in terms of bandwidth reduction ... and the end-to-end speed is 3.1 to 11.2 times faster

* For multivariate time series, OTel Arrow is 3 to 7 times better in terms of bandwidth reduction ... Phase 2 has [not yet] been .. estimated but similar results are expected.

* For logs, OTel Arrow is 1.6 to 2 times better in terms of bandwidth reduction ... and the end-to-end speed is 2.3 to 4.86 times faster

* For traces, OTel Arrow is 1.7 to 2.8 times better in terms of bandwidth reduction ... and the end-to-end speed is 3.37 to 6.16 times faster

[0]: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-proto/pull/3...

[1]: https://github.com/open-telemetry/oteps/blob/main/text/0156-...

[2]: https://github.com/open-telemetry/oteps/blob/main/text/0156-...

We then modified the benchmark to encode our example data which is an opentelemetry trace data.