OpenTelemetry

“While OTEL adds some nice things, I hate using my browser to scan through the logs.”

“Standards based, many off-the-shelf providers, out-of-process + buffered by default”

“OTEL is the standard, we know exactly what agents do, or try to do, without ebpf”

“everyone is already using or heading towards OTEL - so we don't need to reinvent the wheel”

“we've had success with building custom harnesses and processing metrics via OpenTelemetry + Prometheus”

“If you want to know exactly how many milliseconds an external API or DB query took, you need OTel.”

“replace that component by utilities like OpenTelemetry and JSON structured logging”

“it provides a standard that is useful, well maintained, portable to enterprise or self hosted”

“OTel has a nice property of working, which sometimes can't be said about vendor stuff.”

“Otel itself is fine. The documentation is bad though and full of inconsistent best practices”

“Trying to make all the supported languages feel similar (beyond sharing concepts which almost directly match the protocol) is foolish in the extreme”

“every point release seems to re-imagine things enough to break everything and require substantial rewriting”

“turning on auto-instrumentation for a Golang app running in Kubernetes breaks the app”

“a little bit too over-engineered a that it might be very bad in term of performance/wasted network traffic”

“It's missing a few things that I'd like, but I was able to implement them myself.”

“The performance hit is substantial and makes you question what the point of performance instrumentation is”

“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".”

“combined with OpenTelemetry for observability so they don’t have to spend half the day scrolling through gigabytes of logs”

“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 SaaS solutions”

“I've found OTel to still have rough edges and it's not really the one stop shop for telemetry we want it to be at $work yet”

“If you can't trace across agents (like services), then you haven't set up OTEL completely”

“I get the impression this standard is 10x more complicated than it needs to be, but the stuff it replaced was 100x too complicated.”

“Otel has value for things crossing microservices in production, much less in local for a single app.”

“It's honestly wonderful to work with compared to the old vendor supplied frameworks.”

“great for seeing the latency and token counts of individual LLM calls, but they break down when you try to debug the coordination between agents”

“Good agent frameworks already handle observability and cost tracking. OTEL is the way.”

“OpenTelemetry as the collection layer means you're not locked into anyone's agent”

“If you stick to opentelemetry and open source agents and develop a collector infrastructure”

“I work on OTel, and have avoided contributing in that area because I lack the patience to deal with the inconsistences”

“There's too much to learn: OpenTelemetry, OpenTracing, Zipkin, Micrometer, eBPF”

“Opentel is great, but sadly A lot of the stuff that I am using doesn't support it.”

“most projects don't need this amount of insight (when you have to give up so much speed)”

“I've had an overall good experience operating it at numerous places w/o hitting bottlenecks.”

“OpenTelemetry is, last I looked at it, way too immature, unstable, and resource-hungry to be such a foundational part of infrastructure.”

“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.”

“it was mostly problem free, with biggest annoyance being a bit of boilerplate that had to be added”

“Looking at the execution of your code should never alter its fundamental performance the way otel is built to do.”

“otel is at odds with the observability business because these actors have little interest to contribute back to telemetry agents”

“the OpenTelemetry community has built a massive amount of instrumentation in a relatively short period of time”

“when the issue we are trying to solve is data sovereignty then those hurdles become incidental complexity”