opentelemetry-js VS opentelemetry-specification

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.

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.