What Are Traces and Spans in OpenTelemetry?

The amount of additional code that it needs is horrible. We will now have to spend more brain juice on telemetry when working on a feature.

Nah, if you have an important application this is very low cost for adding tons of insight into how your app is running.

It’s really not that bad, integrating it with dashboards is where I found most of the difficulty to be (due to bad documentation). I spent 4 days on implementing observability for this new backend project I’m working on. OTEL logging, tracing, and metric emission took less than a day to implement, instrumentation was very well documented. When I tried to integrate with Grafana dashboards, that’s when things started getting pretty frustrating…

I don't really agree. It's mostly setup done once. Like configuring it and for example attaching some span generator to the library you use to talk with the database. Then future queries get it "for free". And just a single line if you want something custom if you have an annotation in java or using with in python for instance.

I work for Pydantic. We make Logfire, a commercial OTEL backend. But we’ve made wrappers around the OTEL SDKs in various languages that simplify configuration and usage. They can be used with any OTEL compatible backend (although we’d love if you try our SaaS offering): - JavaScript / Typescript: https://github.com/pydantic/logfire-js - Rust: https://github.com/pydantic/logfire-rust - Python: https://github.com/pydantic/logfire

There’s certainly some overhead, nothing is free. But the tradeoff is better insight into your system and better tools to validate issues when they arise. It can be very powerful in those scenarios.

Ive spent countless hours on issues where customers complain about performance or a bug and it just can’t be reproduced. Telemetry allows us to get more information to locate and fix these issues.

Thanks for your comment! It has given me an idea for a project: a simple library that provides a Python decorator that can be used to include basic telemetry for functions in Python code (think spans with the input parameters as attributes): https://github.com/diegojromerolopez/otelize

Feedback welcome!