opentelemetry-python VS opentelemetry-lambda

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.

I mean, sure, you can improve performance a bit by increasing the RAM/compute capacity on the Lambda. But it always adds a pretty steep overhead right now, no matter how much capacity you throw at it.

https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-lambda/issue...

https://github.com/aws-observability/aws-otel-lambda/issues/...

OpenTelemetry AWS Lambda repository

With the sample apps from the opentelemetry-lambda repository the Lambda part itself was easy to implement. What took me some time was to provide the jaeger Fargate service with IaC ouside of an k8s environment. But with ECS and ServiceDiscovery that was easy in the end. This should be even more simple in an EKS environment with the jaegertracing helm-charts.

OpenTelemetry recently released https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-lambda, but they also have this in the official docs https://opentelemetry.io/docs/instrumentation/js/serverless/. What do you consider to be the better option?

opentelemetry-lambda

You don’t have to create an opentelemetry configuration file such as this for each of your lambdas. In fact, you shouldn’t. In AWS, you can use Lambda Layers. You can define the OpenTelemetry tracing piece of code as a Lambda layer and use it in any Lambda you want. Furthermore, OpenTelemetry went ahead and implemented this opentelemetry-lambda layer for us. All we need to do is use it with our config.

Sorry you're having trouble working with the ADOT Lambda Layers :(. Have you had a chance to open an issue on the GitHub repo for OTel Lambda or ADOT Lambda? You should add your expected vs your actual output!