opentelemetry-python VS opentelemetry-java-instrumentation

Python

As an example, Exemplars are part of the metrics spec [1]. The official python library says metrics status is 'stable' [2]. But there's an approximately 2-year old issue with no work on it, titled 'Metrics: Add support for exemplars', where the latest update is that no work has begun [3]. Nothing at a top-level of the opentelemetry-python project indicates that the project does not implement everything in the metrics spec, so if you wanted to use that capability, you are apt to discover it relatively late.

[1] https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/metrics/data-model/...

[2] https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-python

[3] https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-python/issue...

Unfortunately, I have not seen any modern libraries that can match the features offered by the archived library. However, there are similar libraries that could be used, such as https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-python which provides health checks and metrics. Additionally, you could use Prometheus libraries such as https://github.com/prometheus/client\_python to get similar metrics. However, both of these libraries might require some modification to get the desired features

We need to force a specific version of protobuf because of Launcher compatibility issues with newer versions. This was already fixed in opentelemetry-python.

I spent a huge amount of time - maybe 6 hours - digging into the problem. I was flipping back and forth between honeycomb's docs, the open telemetry docs, and the open telemetry python repo digging through issues.

You can check out the current releases of opentelemetry-python.

Java

wget https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-java-instrumentation/releases/latest/download/opentelemetry-javaagent.jar

We are actually able to handle the long tail of tracing by leveraging the amazing open source community. For languages like Java we use the automatic instrumentation created by the OpenTelemetry community which is really great and support ton of libraries, you can see a list of supported libraries here: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-java-instrum...

As in Python, it creates spans for every method call and HTTP entry point. It also instruments JDBC calls, but we have a Reactive stack and thus use R2DBC. For the record, a GitHub issue is open for adding support.

Download the latest Java agent ‘JAR’ from the official repo on GitHub and copy the opentelemetry-javaagent-all.jar file to your project.

Java OpenTelemetry MongoDB library for Java applications

Download the latest version of the Java JAR agent, and copy jar agent file in your application code. We have placed the agent under the folder named agents.

OpenTelemetry and Java Flight Recorder (JFR) cover most bases. Use the OpenTelemetry Java agent if you want auto-instrumentation or just the APIs if you want to do your own instrumentation.

Download the latest Java JAR agent.

OpenTelemetry provides three repositories to instrument applications. The opentelemetry-java-instrumentation repo contains the code for auto-instrumentation of Java applications.