Show HN: Open-source APM with support for tracing, metrics, and logs • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Open-source APM with support for tracing, metrics, and logs

#11

Post by derN3rd » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 8:29 AM UTC

vmihailenco wrote: post #6

derN3rd wrote: post #5

Nice to see so many new projects in the area of APM in the last few months. We recently tried Signoz and Grafana Tempo and while I can't say something about uptrace yet (will definitely try it out) I want to list some pros and cons about them. Grafana Tempo Pros: - Easy and smooth integration into our existing Grafana instance, no additional frontend needed - No new storage engine needed (No additional Clickhouse, Po…

Thanks for the feedback! >- Are there any recommendations for scaling (e.g. benchmarks) on how many spans/s are supported on what hardware? With Uptrace, I was able to achieve 10k spans / second on a single core by running the binary with GOMAXPROCS=1. That is 1-3 terrabytes of compressed data each month which is more than most users need. Practically, you are limited by the $$$ you are willing to spend on ClickHouse…

Thanks for the answer.

I have no other good examples for SSO than Grafana.

But something I would love to see more for logins are Application Tokens. We use Cloudflare Access for Team related logins, which will send such a token in the header, so the application can use it to authorize a user and by which group a user is in it can enable/disable features

https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/identity/au...

This solved our needs for multiple sign in options, as all is now managed through Cloudflare access, but this is obviously not a solution for everyone

Re: Show HN: Open-source APM with support for tracing, metrics, and logs

#12

Post by jonasdevops » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 8:37 AM UTC

Before you try, please make sure you are comfortable with their license - https://github.com/uptrace/uptrace/blob/master/LICENSE (Business Source License 1.1), which as License says "The Business Source License (this document, or the “License”) is not an Open Source license"

Re: Show HN: Open-source APM with support for tracing, metrics, and logs

#13

Post by vmihailenco » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 8:51 AM UTC

jonasdevops wrote: post #12

Before you try, please make sure you are comfortable with their license - https://github.com/uptrace/uptrace/blob/master/LICENSE (Business Source License 1.1), which as License says "The Business Source License (this document, or the “License”) is not an Open Source license"

It is the same license used by MariaDB, Sentry, CockroachDB, Couchbase and many others. Technically it is not open source and instead is called source available, but you can enjoy pretty much the same benefits.

Out of curiosity, what makes you uncomfortable about the license?

Re: Show HN: Open-source APM with support for tracing, metrics, and logs

#14

Post by fmajid » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 9:12 AM UTC

vmihailenco wrote: post #13

jonasdevops wrote: post #12

Before you try, please make sure you are comfortable with their license - https://github.com/uptrace/uptrace/blob/master/LICENSE (Business Source License 1.1), which as License says "The Business Source License (this document, or the “License”) is not an Open Source license"

It is the same license used by MariaDB, Sentry, CockroachDB, Couchbase and many others. Technically it is not open source and instead is called source available, but you can enjoy pretty much the same benefits. Out of curiosity, what makes you uncomfortable about the license?

Er, MariaDB is GPL2, and will forever be since it is derived from MySQL.

I'm guessing they aligned the license terms on those of ClickHouse, which is the underlying data store for Uptrace. From my understanding, if you use Uptrace and ClickHouse to manage your internal telemetry and don't offer it to clients, you should be fine. Still, non-standard license terms give pause, as there is always the possibility they will be restricted further in a bait-and-switch operation like that done by MongoDB or ElasticSearch.

Re: Show HN: Open-source APM with support for tracing, metrics, and logs

#15

Post by vmihailenco » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 9:28 AM UTC

derN3rd wrote: post #11

vmihailenco wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback! >- Are there any recommendations for scaling (e.g. benchmarks) on how many spans/s are supported on what hardware? With Uptrace, I was able to achieve 10k spans / second on a single core by running the binary with GOMAXPROCS=1. That is 1-3 terrabytes of compressed data each month which is more than most users need. Practically, you are limited by the $$$ you are willing to spend on ClickHouse…

Thanks for the answer. I have no other good examples for SSO than Grafana. But something I would love to see more for logins are Application Tokens. We use Cloudflare Access for Team related logins, which will send such a token in the header, so the application can use it to authorize a user and by which group a user is in it can enable/disable features https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/identity/au...…

We already use JWT tokens that are passed in a HTTP cookie so perhaps we could document how it works and let users sign JWT tokens themselves. That way your app only needs to set a cookie and the user should be authorized.

Let's continue the discussion on GitHub https://github.com/uptrace/uptrace/issues/76

Re: Show HN: Open-source APM with support for tracing, metrics, and logs

#16

Post by vmihailenco » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 9:36 AM UTC

fmajid wrote: post #14

vmihailenco wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the same license used by MariaDB, Sentry, CockroachDB, Couchbase and many others. Technically it is not open source and instead is called source available, but you can enjoy pretty much the same benefits. Out of curiosity, what makes you uncomfortable about the license?

Er, MariaDB is GPL2, and will forever be since it is derived from MySQL. I'm guessing they aligned the license terms on those of ClickHouse, which is the underlying data store for Uptrace. From my understanding, if you use Uptrace and ClickHouse to manage your internal telemetry and don't offer it to clients, you should be fine. Still, non-standard license terms give pause, as there is always the possibility they wil…

>the possibility they will be restricted further

It is true for all licenses, for example, it is possible to keep old code available under old permissive license but release all new code under a more restricted license.

None is safe! :)

Re: Show HN: Open-source APM with support for tracing, metrics, and logs

#17

Post by jonasdevops » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 9:51 AM UTC

vmihailenco wrote: post #13

jonasdevops wrote: post #12

Before you try, please make sure you are comfortable with their license - https://github.com/uptrace/uptrace/blob/master/LICENSE (Business Source License 1.1), which as License says "The Business Source License (this document, or the “License”) is not an Open Source license"

It is the same license used by MariaDB, Sentry, CockroachDB, Couchbase and many others. Technically it is not open source and instead is called source available, but you can enjoy pretty much the same benefits. Out of curiosity, what makes you uncomfortable about the license?

I cannot run uptrace in Production:

> The Licensor hereby grants you the right to copy, modify, create derivative works, redistribute, and make non-production use of the Licensed Work.

So what is the point of even trying to install it in other environments?

Re: Show HN: Open-source APM with support for tracing, metrics, and logs

#18

Post by traceroute66 » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 9:57 AM UTC

vmihailenco wrote: post #13

jonasdevops wrote: post #12

Before you try, please make sure you are comfortable with their license - https://github.com/uptrace/uptrace/blob/master/LICENSE (Business Source License 1.1), which as License says "The Business Source License (this document, or the “License”) is not an Open Source license"

It is the same license used by MariaDB, Sentry, CockroachDB, Couchbase and many others. Technically it is not open source and instead is called source available, but you can enjoy pretty much the same benefits. Out of curiosity, what makes you uncomfortable about the license?

> Out of curiosity, what makes you uncomfortable about the license?

I can't speak for the OP, but my view is that all these semi-open (AGPL,BSL etc.) licenses do is muddy the waters. Its essentially giving the developer's lawyers enough grey area to work with in order to find something they can pin you on.

IMHO a company's code should either be closed source or open source. Wishy-washy no-mans-land wordings in the middle don't really help anyone (except the lawyer's bank balance, of course).

Re: Show HN: Open-source APM with support for tracing, metrics, and logs

#19

Post by tmd83 » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 10:06 AM UTC

I wonder if anyone can answer some question on distributed tracing for me.

The difference between old days of APM vs. tracing as I understand is two things.

1. Originally APM was single process and it was language aware, usually do sampling stacktrace to find where times are being taken and some very well know place to instrument for exact timing say response time or query time.

Tracers are more working by instrumenting methods of framework/servers/runtime at well known point and getting the timing. In man ways it's a lot more coarse as it might know of a hot loop that I have in my code. But it can trace very well with exact timing at framework boundary like web, cache, db etc.

2. The APM were primarily single process and couldn't really show a different service/process which doesn't work in a micro-service/distributed world.

The way I understand it is that Tracers would allow me to narrow down to the service/component very easily. Whether I can find out why that component is slow might not be as easy (not sure what granularity tracing happens inside a component).

I wonder if this understanding of mine is correct.

The second thing I am really unsure about is sampling and overhead. What's the usual overhead of a single tracing (I know it's variable) but generally are they more expensive at a single request level. Also do they usually sample and is there a good/recommend way to sample this. I forgot exactly who but (probably NewRelic) was saying they collect all traces (like every request?) and discard if they are not anomalous (to save on storage). But does that mean taking a trace is very cheap? And is that end of the request sampling decision something that's common or that's a totally unique capability some have.

Re: Show HN: Open-source APM with support for tracing, metrics, and logs

#20

Post by jillesvangurp » Tue, Sep 06, 2022, 10:09 AM UTC

vmihailenco wrote: post #16

fmajid wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Er, MariaDB is GPL2, and will forever be since it is derived from MySQL. I'm guessing they aligned the license terms on those of ClickHouse, which is the underlying data store for Uptrace. From my understanding, if you use Uptrace and ClickHouse to manage your internal telemetry and don't offer it to clients, you should be fine. Still, non-standard license terms give pause, as there is always the possibility they wil…

>the possibility they will be restricted further It is true for all licenses, for example, it is possible to keep old code available under old permissive license but release all new code under a more restricted license. None is safe! :)

This not correct. There's a difference between OSS projects with shared copyright (every individual contributor holds the copyright to their contributions) and oss projects where the copyright is required to be transferred to some company.

In the second case, this company then holds the copyright to the entire source tree and can re-license it at will. Mongo and Elastic did this and they are good examples of why you should not transfer copyright because they then have the right to re-license your contributions as they please. That's the reason they insist on copyright transfers. They reserve the right to change the license on future versions of the software. You can still use the old versions under the license that applied at the time.

So, Opensearch is a fork of the last Apache 2.0 licensed version of Elasticsearch. Versions after that are licensed under a non OSS license whereas Opensearch is a proper open source project where copyright belongs to individual contributors, which ironically is still mostly Elastic plus whatever individual opensearch contributors added.

Most projects don't insist on copyright transfers however and given enough external contributors it becomes increasingly hard for them to get permission to change he license.

Regardless of the license, there is absolutely zero chance of something like mysql, linux, or other long existing OSS projects ever being re-licensed because it would require tracing down tens of thousands of copyright holders (or their surviving relatives) to get permission for that most of whom would probably not be willing to do that. This is so impractical that it will never happen. And even if it happened, anyone could continue using and contributing under the old license. All you'd have is a fork that is cut off from those contributions (because licenses like Gpl v2 don't allow mixing with proprietary code). So given a permission you will never get, you'd have a fork that is effectively yours of an original source tree that still belongs to all the original contributors and is licensed under the original license.

OSS done properly builds communities that exist for as long as people continue to be willing to use and contribute to the software. Some OSS projects are now decades old.