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So now I should be excited about telemetry and that GitHub uses this in their systems?
This raises alarm bells into if I should be using them for my repositories at all.
Unsure if I should trust GitHub after this now.
Downvoters: I don’t understand here? So I should be excited about telemetry? Why?
A lot of very confused weird comments here. This article is about a fairly large sized tech company adopting a fairly recent but increasingly mainstream & popular tool that helps them understand their operations. It'll give them a standard way to see what their computers are doing, across their various systems. OpenTelemetry is one of the key emerging cloud standards, and I expect many many many many more articles li…
These aren't scary things.
A lot of very confused weird comments here. This article is about a fairly large sized tech company adopting a fairly recent but increasingly mainstream & popular tool that helps them understand their operations. It'll give them a standard way to see what their computers are doing, across their various systems. OpenTelemetry is one of the key emerging cloud standards, and I expect many many many many more articles li…
People here are blindly rage-triggered by the word "telemetry" without even taking 2 seconds to glance through to see what it actually is.
A lot of very confused weird comments here. This article is about a fairly large sized tech company adopting a fairly recent but increasingly mainstream & popular tool that helps them understand their operations. It'll give them a standard way to see what their computers are doing, across their various systems. OpenTelemetry is one of the key emerging cloud standards, and I expect many many many many more articles li…
Agreed. This comment section is bizarre for HN. It's sort of like getting scared that "Prometheus" collects "metrics". Or that "Kafka" tracks "events". These aren't scary things.
From reading the OpenTelemetry site, that doesn't seem to be their main, stated purpose, but thefounder's post in another part of the thread leads me to think it may, in fact, see that kind of use, too.
[EDIT] damn, sorry, downvoters, for explaining the reason this is getting knee-jerk negative reactions from people, when someone expressed confusion about it. Again, I think the main reason is the word used, and what it's mostly associated with now, among some folks.
A lot of very confused weird comments here. This article is about a fairly large sized tech company adopting a fairly recent but increasingly mainstream & popular tool that helps them understand their operations. It'll give them a standard way to see what their computers are doing, across their various systems. OpenTelemetry is one of the key emerging cloud standards, and I expect many many many many more articles li…
> I haven't heard of a single case of them being used for user tracking or behavioral analytics.
and then you said:
> That we will start to see the potential to harvest these records for analytics…
So this can be used to gather analytics of any sort of data, such as spying then? This is still worrisome.
I think it would be great to show the performance impact of these SDKs because it is one of the really important aspects of monitoring (being non-intrusive).
I haven't used it myself, I've used census, and now looking into OpenTelemetry (though from the least finished version - C++). Had mixed success with it in the past, but trying again. Also not looking at all into side-cars, etc. - We compile all our internal tools, so adding this inside is where I'm getting into.
I've had several times (while at Google), being asked by an SRE that I would call on issues, and they would request to bump the sample tracing from minimal defaults (was it 1 in 100,000 or million - forget) sometimes to 1:1 - for say 30 seconds. This way they'll receive on their end (in their systems that we use) flags to sample too, and at the end get full logs.
Usually the whole trace is visible in few minutes. There were few UI's (nothign like zipkin/jaeged/others outside) - some of them with very "imgui"-like hacky (in good sense) view - like programmer art all over (which I loved - it was much more condensed than standard zipkin/jaeger).
You could've marked something as important, and it'll retain for longer period - otherwise - poof - soon gone. Also it would collect info sometimes directly from the machine it was in (rather than wait to populate).
Obviously, I don't know the details - I was just an user, or more like - allowing (when oncall) trace sampling to be bumped by the SRE - so they would get more info. It's what hooked me actually, because how else would one get everything end-to-end.
Surprisingly it's also useful for single apps, where you have threads (or concurrency tasks, like with TBB/ConCRT) doing nested parallel_for's or spawning jobs, and you want to get idea what's going on. The only tricky bit is how to get your "context" propagated from one thread to another (also not readily done).
It's one thing that the "golan" got right with their context for example.
So it's really awesome, but probably really hard to get right the first few times.
I’m now gravely concerned about GitHub after reading this. So now I should be excited about telemetry and that GitHub uses this in their systems? This raises alarm bells into if I should be using them for my repositories at all. Unsure if I should trust GitHub after this now. Downvoters: I don’t understand here? So I should be excited about telemetry? Why?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. This comment section is bizarre for HN. It's sort of like getting scared that "Prometheus" collects "metrics". Or that "Kafka" tracks "events". These aren't scary things.
"Telemetry" has come to be associated with activities that definitely qualify a product as spyware (though they've become fairly common—thanks, "data-driven" marketers). From reading the OpenTelemetry site, that doesn't seem to be their main, stated purpose, but thefounder's post in another part of the thread leads me to think it may, in fact, see that kind of use, too. [EDIT] damn, sorry, downvoters, for explaining…
I’m now gravely concerned about GitHub after reading this. So now I should be excited about telemetry and that GitHub uses this in their systems? This raises alarm bells into if I should be using them for my repositories at all. Unsure if I should trust GitHub after this now. Downvoters: I don’t understand here? So I should be excited about telemetry? Why?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Telemetry" has come to be associated with activities that definitely qualify a product as spyware (though they've become fairly common—thanks, "data-driven" marketers). From reading the OpenTelemetry site, that doesn't seem to be their main, stated purpose, but thefounder's post in another part of the thread leads me to think it may, in fact, see that kind of use, too. [EDIT] damn, sorry, downvoters, for explaining…
Every tool is also a weapon, obviously. We haven't stopped making hammers because they can be used to hit people.
[EDIT] and, especially, that's why they're jumping to the conclusion that github is gearing up to do more spying on its users, which is the part that I think people are bothered by, not the existence of this software package.