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What Are Traces and Spans in OpenTelemetry?

(oneuptime.com)
116 points ndhandala | 1 comments | 27 Aug 25 12:10 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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N_Lens ◴[31 Aug 25 10:41 UTC] No.45082128[source]▶
OTEL as a set of standards is admirable and ambitious, though in my experience actual implementation differs significantly between different vendors and they all seem to overcomplicate it.
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eurekin ◴[31 Aug 25 12:31 UTC] No.45082689[source]▶
Plus that tens of terabytes of data you have to store for a week worth of traces
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c2h5oh ◴[31 Aug 25 14:42 UTC] No.45083511[source]▶
That's why you sample just enough instead of storing everything
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voidfunc ◴[31 Aug 25 14:56 UTC] No.45083636[source]▶
That sounds great until you have a massive issue that costs the company real money and leadership asks why you weren't logging everything in full fidelity?

We run with Debug logging on in prod for that reason too. We also ingest insane amounts of data but it does seem to be worth it for a sufficiently complex and important enough system to really have it all.

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1. TYPE_FASTER ◴[01 Sep 25 16:59 UTC] No.45094434[source]▶
I’ve used feature flags to manage logging verbosity and sample rate. It’s really nice to be able to go from logging very little to incrementally pump up the volume when there’s an incident.