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

app.uptrace.dev

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

#21

Post by vmihailenco »

jonasdevops wrote: post #17
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?

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?

You can self-host Uptrace and use it in production environment. This is explicitly stated in the FAQ - https://github.com/uptrace/uptrace#faq . But you can't resell Uptrace to others.

I can only repeat that the same BSL license is used by MariaDB, Sentry, CockroachDB, Couchbase, and others. I am not a lawyer and thus not qualified to discuss details.

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

#22

Post by [deleted] »

vmihailenco wrote: post #21
jonasdevops wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You can self-host Uptrace and use it in production environment. This is explicitly stated in the FAQ - https://github.com/uptrace/uptrace#faq . But you can't resell Uptrace to others. I can only repeat that the same BSL license is used by MariaDB, Sentry, CockroachDB, Couchbase, and others. I am not a lawyer and thus not qualified to discuss details.

[deleted]

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

#23

Post by detaro »

jonasdevops wrote: post #17
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?

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?

Read the next sentence of the license.

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

#24

Post by vmihailenco »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #20
vmihailenco wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I am not a lawyer so I can't keep up the discussion on the necessary level so I will just clarify few things.

Uptrace uses the BSL license to forbid or rather not allow other companies creating a cloud service using Uptrace code, because that is how we are planning to monetize. But you can self-host Uptrace and use it as you want to monitor your (production) application. I think this is fair enough.

I am sure there are many complications with re-licensing, but it happens in practice, for example, Sentry now uses BSL license. And you can't do anything about it except to fork old Sentry. But then you will have to maintain it yourself.

And I am not arguing with anything you've said, but there are not that many financially thriving truly OSS projects. That's why people like me have to complicate their lives with BSL, AGPL, and others.

Thanks for the comment!

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

#25

Post by vmihailenco »

traceroute66 wrote: post #18
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?

> 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 mi…

Uptrace uses the BSL license to forbid or rather not allow other companies creating a cloud service using Uptrace code, because that is how we are planning to monetize. But you can self-host Uptrace and use it as you want to monitor your (production) application. I think this is fair enough.

If there is another license that better reflects our intentions, let us know.

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

#26

Post by jarym »

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’s a shame that whenever something cool is posted on HN some long ass thread about licensing floats to the top.

Nothing wrong with the parent comment but do we really need a ‘yes it is’ / ‘no it isn’t’ back and forth that goes on seemingly forever almost EVERY TIME?

I’m gonna need a ‘license nitpick remover’ to complement my adblocker!

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

#27

Post by [deleted] »

detaro wrote: post #23
jonasdevops wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Read the next sentence of the license.

[deleted]

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

#28

Post by KronisLV »

This seems like a pretty cool project!

Currently using Apache Skywalking myself, because it's reasonably simple to get up and running, as well as integrate with some of the more popular stacks: https://skywalking.apache.org/

I do wonder how ClickHouse (which Uptrace uses) would compare with something like ElasticSearch (which is used by Skywalking and some others) and how badly/well an attempt to use something like MariaDB/MySQL/PostgreSQL for a similar workload would actually go.

I mean, something like Matomo Analytics already uses a traditional RDBMS for storing its data, albeit it might be an order of magnitude or two off from the typical APM solution.

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

#29

Post by vmihailenco »

tmd83 wrote: post #19

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 instrument…

My understanding is that APM became or always was a marketing term which is used rather freely. For that reason I try to avoid it, but search engines love it and I don't know a better alternative.

>Whether I can find out why that component is slow might not be as easy (not sure what granularity tracing happens inside a component).

It is true that you can't always guess what operation going to be slow and instrument it, but it is almost always a network or a database call. There is still no way to tell *why* it is slow, but the more data you have the more hints you get.

>What's the usual overhead of a single tracing

Depending on what is your base comparison point the answer can be very different.

Usually, you trace or instrument network/filesystem/database calls and in those cases the overhead is negligible (few percents at most).

>But does that mean taking a trace is very cheap?

What you've described is tail-based sampling and it only helps with reducing storage requirements. It does not reduce the sampling overhead. Check https://uptrace.dev/opentelemetry/sampling.html

But is taking a trace cheap? Definitely. Billions of traces? Not so.

>request sampling decision something that's common or that's a totally unique capability some have.

It is a common practice to reduce cost of sampling when you have billions of traces, but it is an advanced feature because it requires backends to buffer incoming spans in memory so you can decide if the trace is anomalous or not.

Besides, you can't store only anomalous traces because you will lose a lot of useful details and you can't really detect anomaly without knowing what is the norm.

Hopefully that helps.

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

#30

Post by preisschild »

traceroute66 wrote: post #18
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?

> 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 mi…

Why do you consider the AGPL semi-open? AGPL is just GPL specific to webservices
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