opentelemetry-js VS PostHog

Citations: [1] https://pplx-res.cloudinary.com/image/upload/v1747427714/user_uploads/48031643/6b29f8b1-fff0-45bb-9ae7-f0bc2d98c3cb/17474277015804148959788849369994.jpg [2] https://docs.camunda.io/docs/components/modeler/desktop-modeler/telemetry/ [3] https://camunda.com/blog/2025/02/one-exporter-to-rule-them-all-exploring-camunda-exporter/ [4] https://camunda.com/blog/2025/01/performance-tuning-camunda-8/ [5] https://forum.camunda.io/t/instrumentation-of-camunda-processes-for-open-telemetry/51400 [6] https://docs.camunda.io/docs/self-managed/zeebe-deployment/zeebe-gateway/interceptors/ [7] https://docs.dapr.io/operations/observability/tracing/otel-collector/open-telemetry-collector/ [8] https://docs.camunda.io/docs/8.7/self-managed/operational-guides/monitoring/metrics/ [9] https://camunda.com/blog/2024/04/camunda-8-5-release/ [10] https://github.com/camunda/zeebe/issues/9742 [11] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-implement-custom-interceptors-camunda-85-anubhav-mangla-fl14c [12] https://forum.camunda.io/t/zeebe-and-distributed-tracing/36723 [13] https://javadoc.io/static/io.quarkiverse.zeebe/quarkus-zeebe/0.4.0/io/quarkiverse/zeebe/runtime/tracing/ZeebeOpenTelemetryClientInterceptor.html [14] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/distributed-tracing-springboot-opentelemetry-api-calls-chandan-khatri-wpw7c [15] https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-java-instrumentation/issues/12122 [16] https://camunda.com/blog/2022/11/how-to-build-camunda-platform-8-connector/ [17] https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-js/issues/2786 [18] https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/monitor-applications/frontend-observability/instrument/opentelemetry-js/ [19] https://coralogix.com/guides/opentelemetry/opentelemetry-tracing-how-it-works-tutorial-and-best-practices/ [20] https://grafana.com/docs/grafana-cloud/send-data/metrics/metrics-prometheus/prometheus-config-examples/camunda-zeebe/ [21] https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/trace/api/

... //https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/opentelemetry-browser-instrumentation //https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-js/tree/main/experimental/packages/opentelemetry-instrumentation-xml-http-request //https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-js-contrib/tree/main/plugins/web/opentelemetry-instrumentation-user-interaction //https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-js-contrib/tree/main/plugins/web/opentelemetry-instrumentation-long-task //https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-js-contrib/tree/main/plugins/web/opentelemetry-instrumentation-long-task export default async () => { const otlpOptions = { omitted }; const attributes = { omitted } provider.addSpanProcessor(new SimpleSpanProcessor(new OTLPTraceExporter(otlpOptions))); provider.register({contextManager: new StackContextManager()}); registerInstrumentations({ instrumentations: [ getWebAutoInstrumentations({ '@opentelemetry/instrumentation-xml-http-request': { clearTimingResources: true, } }), new LongTaskInstrumentation({ observerCallback: (span, longtaskEvent) => { span.setAttribute('location.pathname', window.location.pathname) } }), new FetchInstrumentation({ propagateTraceHeaderCorsUrls: [new RegExp('\\/api\\/*')], ignoreUrls: [new RegExp('\\/tile\\/*')], })], }); ... };

To enable only @opentelemetry/instrumentation-http and @opentelemetry/instrumentation-express you can run this command below.

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?

Posthog is pretty good but very pushy towards using their SaaS (understandably). Self hosting is not really advertised on their main site however is buried in their gh repo as a footnote [1] with indications of vague issues past 100K events/month. Haven’t delved into how to scale it past that though and they do provide some docs that I have yet to review.

Also the primary repo is not FOSS, and that "100% FOSS" repo is buried in yet another footnote [2].

Plausible follows in PH footsteps but is not fully faithful to open source. If you want to self host, you won’t have same set of features as their SaaS and need to rely on long term releases for their "community edition" [3]

On "Ahrefs", is there even an open source version of their product? I couldn’t easily find it (on mobile). [4]

Maybe I’ll take a look at others you mentioned later but if rybbit can remain faithful to their FOSS roots then I think there’s a real chance of it becoming huge.

For thosw that don’t want to self host (mostly corporate shitholes), rybbit can milk them with their managed SaaS product.

[1] https://github.com/PostHog/posthog?tab=readme-ov-file#self-h...

[2] https://github.com/PostHog/posthog?tab=readme-ov-file#open-s...

[3] https://github.com/plausible/analytics?tab=readme-ov-file#ca...

[4] https://ahrefs.com/

I'm unable to see their website

https://posthog.com

Is it just me?

Website link: PostHog

Send events to analytics tools like PostHog.

For SaaS startups looking for a powerful, privacy-conscious analytics platform, PostHog provides an all-in-one solution designed for modern product teams.

The next rung up are User recordings. For users that are having issues, we have concrete recorded data for their flow. The flows would include anything relevant to the application, how they used it, what actions they took. All so we can actually see what happened in context for when there is a problem. No one wants to spend any time looking at recordings if they don't have to. It is also very difficult to identify the root cause of problems by reviewing a recording, but having them is indispensable to your support engineers when they need them, when a user has reported a issue. Solutions include PostHog, FullStory, Sentry. If you don't have these recordings, then the next best alternative (which is very far away) is getting a live screencast from the user. These are less useful, and more expensive to obtain. Worst of all, they can and have been used to breach sensitive systems.

Posthog. Posthog has a lot of sub products but I use it mainly for analytics and session replays. I have to say Posthog is an impressive product. Everything from dev experience to dashboards is just awesome. Great to see GA finally got some real competition. I'm looking forward to try all the other products from them.

Visit Posthog Website and signup to create your account using either email, google, or github etc.

We use tools like Posthog to measure how users are using our products. This allows us to see what features are being used and which ones are not.