tracing VS opentelemetry-rust

The video description is as follows:

In this stream, we peel back the crust on the tracing crate — https://github.com/tokio-rs/tracing/ — and explore its interface, structure, and mechanisms. We talk about spans, events, their attributes and fields, and how to think about them in async code. We also dig into what subscribers are, how they pick up events, and how you can construct your own subscribers through the layer abstraction. For more details about tracing, see https://docs.rs/tracing/latest/tracing/.

> What's been your biggest issues around ergonomics/amenities for OpenTelemetry?

I can't speak generally, but in the Rust ecosystem the various crates don't play well together. Here's one example: <https://github.com/tokio-rs/tracing/issues/2648> There are four crates involved (tracing-attributes, tracing-opentelemetry, opentelemetry, and opentelemetry-datadog) and none of them fit properly into any of the others.

The tracing (logging) mechanism in an asynchronous codebase (tracing).

Tracing is Tokio's alternative for async code.

At a technical level, in Rust, both [tracing]https://crates.io/crates/tracing) and log are entire ecosystems (though for the latter at least there's also third party logging frameworks), and there's at least a bridge from log to tracing.

I am using https://github.com/tokio-rs/tracing for logging purposes in my application. I would like to develop a feature wherein logs should be saved to a database table (via sea-orm). Something similar is this, but it does not solve my needs fully.

I've used the tracing infrastructure with tracing_flame to profile some hot paths in async code: https://github.com/tokio-rs/tracing/tree/master/tracing-flame

Oh nice! IIRC when I checked, it was the Unicode tables that smashed the code size. I recently hit the same issue with the tracing crate, where a crate feature (for env var filtering) pulled in regex and my binary was suddenly 1MB bigger.

I know about tools such as tracing, jaeger or tracy. While having a complete tracing could be a potential solution, these tools don't work with no_std.

tracing by itself only outputs log data, you need to consume them in a subscriber, the tracing-subscriber crate exists for this. (example)

I believe if you set up an Open Telemetry tracer, you can use the Datadog Lambda Extension to send those traces (as well as logs and some additional lambda metrics) to Datadog.

A lot of APM products these days support OpenTelemetry in addition to their custom APM agents. You could try using https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-rust paired with an APM provider that works with OpenTelemetry.

(Source: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-rust/blob/main/examples/http/src/client.rs)

Here’s a recent example: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-rust/pull/881

dd-trace-layer is a middleware for sending Datadog's trace. It's based on Tower and OpenTelemetry Rust.

I plan to use OpenTelemetry for my async project, but I'm a bit unclear about whether to use the `tracing`, native `opentelemetry` or even the `tracing-opentelemetry` crate? Both tracing and opentelemetry support instrumenting async/await code. What is the relationship between tracing and opentelemetry? If Otel is trying to standardize a spec for observability across languages and vendors and supports async/await rust code, what's the motivation to learn the `tracing` crate's API at this time?

The git repository called opentelemetry-rust contains implementations of several crates that expand the opentelemetry ecosystem. There you can find common instrumentations, exporters, and subscribers use them in a Rust program.

Not sure about the Aspecto exporter you are using but the last time I tried to use the Jaeger one it seemed fundamentally broken if you had even a moderate amount of spans in a way that keeps popping up and the developers keep closing with various suggestions for workarounds (on the issues of previous people encountering it) that did not work for me ( https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-rust/issues/851 ).

You could give open telemetry a try. I've been meaning to check it out, but haven't had a chance yet. https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-rust

Would love to see this work with OpenTelemetry: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-rust