# OpenTelemetry Hacker Approved page: https://hackerapproved.com/p/opentelemetry/ 31 people recommended OpenTelemetry in Hacker News comments, 23 had mixed feelings and 52 criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 12 months, in 28 threads. It does not meet the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** More people criticize it than recommend it. Vendor-neutral standard for traces, metrics and logs, with many backends that accept its data. Common caveat: the specs and SDKs are complex, and the documentation is often inconsistent. Summary written by Claude from the comments below. ## What people warn about - Overly complex and over-engineered (3 comments in the sample): "The learning curve is steep, the documentation can be a maze of specs, and the SDKs (especially for metrics and logs) can feel over-engineered." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45846099)) "I get the impression this standard is 10x more complicated than it needs to be, but the stuff it replaced was 100x too complicated." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47373366)) "a little bit too over-engineered a that it might be very bad in term of performance/wasted network traffic" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49399798)) - Unstable with breaking changes (2 comments in the sample): "OpenTelemetry is, last I looked at it, way too immature, unstable, and resource-hungry to be such a foundational part of infrastructure." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45936019)) "every point release seems to re-imagine things enough to break everything and require substantial rewriting" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49401541)) - Significant performance overhead (2 comments in the sample): "Looking at the execution of your code should never alter its fundamental performance the way otel is built to do." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845902)) "The performance hit is substantial and makes you question what the point of performance instrumentation is" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49395846)) - Documentation is inconsistent and hard (1 comment in the sample): "Otel itself is fine. The documentation is bad though and full of inconsistent best practices" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49401978)) ## Why people recommend it - Vendor-neutral standard with many backends (4 comments in the sample): "At least with Open Telemetry, anyone can write an OTLP "source" using free, open specifications, and it'll "just work" with dozens of third-party "sinks" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49395167)) "Standards based, many off-the-shelf providers, out-of-process + buffered by default" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50156016)) "OpenTelemetry as the collection layer means you're not locked into anyone's agent" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47085504)) - Works reliably in production (3 comments in the sample): "I've had an overall good experience operating it at numerous places w/o hitting bottlenecks." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45944379)) "OTel has a nice property of working, which sometimes can't be said about vendor stuff." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49405281)) "it was mostly problem free, with biggest annoyance being a bit of boilerplate that had to be added" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45845975)) - Traces latency across services and calls (3 comments in the sample): "Otel has value for things crossing microservices in production, much less in local for a single app." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47373239)) "If you want to know exactly how many milliseconds an external API or DB query took, you need OTel." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49518469)) "If you can't trace across agents (like services), then you haven't set up OTEL completely" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47380653)) - Free, open and well maintained (1 comment in the sample): "instrumentation is easy and free (as both in beer and freedom) but then for the dashboarding part is where there are literally tens of different…" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47542069)) ## The badge A product earns the Hacker Approved badge when at least 10 people recommend it, recommenders outnumber critics at least 2 to 1 (mixed feelings count toward neither side), it was recommended in at least 4 of the 12 months and in at least 5 different threads, and no single thread supplies more than half of the people who recommend it. Health and money products are never badged. ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "OpenTelemetry", https://hackerapproved.com/p/opentelemetry/ (31 recommend, 23 mixed, 52 criticize; Hacker News comments, November 2025 to October 2026). Counts updated 2 Nov 2026, with data through October 31, 2026.