self-hosted VS opentelemetry-proto

I was responding to the One of the Sentry inconvenience is self-hosting: it relies on so many services it can be very complicated to maintain part, and also reminding readers that if they, too, hate companies that rug-pull their open source licenses, there is a band-aid for both parts

Compare https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/9.1.2/docker-c... with https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/24.4.2/docker-... for what life used to be like for running Sentry on-prem. It was awesome

It would take a ton of work to dig up the actual memory and CPU requirements of each one, but rest assured they're not zero, so every one of those services eats ram and requires TLC when, not if, they shit themselves. So, more parts == more headaches with all other things being equal

Then, I deeply appreciate that there are a whole spectrum of reactions to the various licensing schemes in use nowadays, and a bunch of folks don't care. I care, though, because I have gotten immense value from open source projects, and have contributed changes back to quite a few. It has been my life experience that any of those "source available" licenses usually are very hostile toward making local builds and if I can't build it to match how prod goes, then I can't test my fixes in my environment and then I can't contribute the PR with any faith

This is the point where I will point out that you can self-host Sentry free of charge :) https://develop.sentry.dev/self-hosted/

Sentry can be self hosted: https://develop.sentry.dev/self-hosted/

The people we're concerned about are not the hundreds of thousands of Sentry users, including those that self-host.

We're concerned about people who have taken the software for the purposes of competing directly against us, that hinders our ability to monetize the work. Monetizing the work helps us continue improving the software and distribute it for free use, benefitting those aforementioned real users (e.g. https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted).

> I mean no slander or disrespect to anyone involved, but there was a DataDog alternative posted sometime in the last few weeks that had a docker-compose with like 15 containers in it.

Reminds me of Sentry: https://develop.sentry.dev/self-hosted/

This is their example docker-compose for self-hosting: https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/master/docker-...

It has:

  - exim4 (smtp)

> What should people use?

I recall Apache Skywalking being pretty good, especially for smaller/medium scale projects: https://skywalking.apache.org/

The architecture is simple, the performance is adequate, it doesn't make you spend days configuring it and it even supports various different data stores: https://skywalking.apache.org/docs/main/v9.0.0/en/setup/back...

The problems with it are that it isn't super popular (although has agents for most popular stacks), the docs could be slightly better and I recall them also working on a new UI so there is a little bit of churn: https://skywalking.apache.org/downloads/

Still better versus some of the other options when you need something that just works instead of spending a lot of time configuring something (even when that something might be superior in regards to the features): https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/master/docker-...

Sentry is just the first thing that comes to mind (OpenTelemetry also isn't simpler due to how much it tries to do), but compare its complexity to Skywalking: https://github.com/apache/skywalking/blob/master/docker/dock...

I wish there was more self-hosted software like that out there, enough to address certain concerns in a simple way on day 1 and leave branching out to more complex options like OpenTelemetry once you have a separate team for that and the cash is rolling in.

Sounds interesting!

Will you compare with qryn? Self-hosted sentry?

qryn.metrico.in/

https://develop.sentry.dev/self-hosted/

I haven't done it in years, but technically sentry is able to be self hosted https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted

Maybe, you are asking yourself: "But I already had instrumented my applications with vendor-specific libraries and I'm using their agents and monitoring tools, why should I change to OpenTelemetry?". The answer is: maybe you're right and I don't want to encourage you to update the way how you are doing observability in your applications, that's a hard and complex task. But, if you are starting from scratch or you are not happy with your current observability infrastructure, OpenTelemetry is the best choice, independently of the backend telemetry tool that you are using. I would like to invite you to take a look at the number of exporters available in the collector contrib section, if your backend tracing tool is not there, probably it's already using the Open Telemetry Protocol (OTLP) and you will be able to use the core collector. Otherwise, you should consider changing your backend telemetry tool or contributing to the project creating a new exporter.

Here's the example payloads for OTLP over JSON and example of how to ingest them: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-proto/tree/m...

An OTLP receiver can receive data via gRPC or HTTP using the OTLP format. There are advanced configurations that you can enable via the YAML file.

Cerbos fully transitioned from OpenCensus to OpenTelemetry, a move that significantly boosts our metrics and tracing capabilities. This shift allows for more efficient integration with a variety of observability products supporting the OpenTelemetry protocol (OTLP) but also offers the flexibility to use push metrics and fine-tune trace sampling. With this update, configuration through the tracing block in Cerbos files is deprecated in favor of using OpenTelemetry environment variables.

Networking is Easy (Really!) Since you install the agent directly into the environment where you are running your application, there is no complex networking. When developing in localMode, the agent listens on the common OpenTelemetry Line Protocol (OTLP) on ports 4317 & 4318 automatically.

Oh nice, thank you (and also solumos) for the links! It looks like oteps/pull/171 (merged June 2023) expanded and superseded the opentelemetry-proto/pull/346 PR (closed Jul 2022) [0]. The former resulted in merging OpenTelemetry Enhancement Proposal 156 [1], with some interesting results especially for 'Phase 2' where they implemented columnar storage end-to-end (see the Validation section [2]):

* For univariate time series, OTel Arrow is 2 to 2.5 better in terms of bandwidth reduction ... and the end-to-end speed is 3.1 to 11.2 times faster

* For multivariate time series, OTel Arrow is 3 to 7 times better in terms of bandwidth reduction ... Phase 2 has [not yet] been .. estimated but similar results are expected.

* For logs, OTel Arrow is 1.6 to 2 times better in terms of bandwidth reduction ... and the end-to-end speed is 2.3 to 4.86 times faster

* For traces, OTel Arrow is 1.7 to 2.8 times better in terms of bandwidth reduction ... and the end-to-end speed is 3.37 to 6.16 times faster

[0]: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-proto/pull/3...

[1]: https://github.com/open-telemetry/oteps/blob/main/text/0156-...

[2]: https://github.com/open-telemetry/oteps/blob/main/text/0156-...

We then modified the benchmark to encode our example data which is an opentelemetry trace data.