opentelemetry-specification VS otel-with-apache-pulsar

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Well actually. They (python SDK maintainers) argue their implementation is the correct one according to the spec. See this issue thread for example.

https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specificatio...

There are more. This is a symptom of a how hard it is to dive into Otel due to its surface area being so big.

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.

For monitoring: If you want to go the open source route, the open telemetry ecosystem is booming. You could use the open telemetry java agent along with their collector, and then use Elastic APM, which could give you a good starting point. Here is a small example project I found on github that was fun to play around with and explore the capabilities of a setup like this: https://github.com/riferrei/otel-with-apache-pulsar