opentelemetry-python VS shovel

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.

It doesn't read from files unfortunately, but https://openobserve.ai/ is very easy to set up locally (single binary) and send otel logs/metrics/traces to.

Here's how I run it locally for my little shovel project - https://github.com/bbkane/shovel#run-the-webapp-locally-with... .

Also linked from that README is an Ansible playbook to start OpenObserve as a systems service on a Linux VM.

Alternatively, see the shovel codebase I linked above for a "stdout" TracerProvider. You could do something like that to save to a file, and then use a tool to prettify the JSON. I have a small script to format json logs at https://github.com/bbkane/dotfiles/blob/2df9af5a9bbb40f2e101...