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Why and how GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry

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61–70 of 113 posts

Re: Why and how GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry

#61
post #11

Does this put "telemetry" in Git itself? If you're just using git to access Github, is it snooping on you?

No, OpenTelemetry is focussed on gathering metrics in distributed systems. Metrics, log aggregation and tracing of requests from the entrypoint (load balancer) all the way to the backend services and data stores. Take a look at the Jaeger and Zipkin websites and it should be pretty clear what it is used for.

That makes zero sense. Of course accessing a GitHub remote with git means accessing a huge distributed system and involves "load balancer all the way to the backend services and data stores". If anything, that is the core of GitHub and the webui is bolted on.

It's baffling to me, what do people think happens when they pull/push from a GitHub repo?

Re: Why and how GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry

#62
post #12

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…

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Re: Why and how GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry

#63
post #12

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…

It's a bit disappointing, really. There are people commenting who clearly have no idea what the tool even is, haven't even tried to figure it out, haven't read the other comments already here.

I'd really hope for better among the HNews readership.

Re: Why and how GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry

#64

For everyone blindly rage triggered by the presence of the bytes "t-e-l-e-m-e-t-r-y", cogman10 elsewhere ITT [1] summarized that concern well: > It's like being afraid your browser profiler is being used to spy on you. Could it do that? Sure. but there are so many easier ways to accomplish the same task. So take a second to straighten out your panties and then actually look at the thing first. It's just an open-sourc…

The knee-jerk reactions are unfortunately because the word "telemetry" has been perverted into having that connotation by those who don't want to call what they're doing "spyware". It certainly doesn't help to see that word along with "GitHub", who is now owned by a company which is doing exactly that.

Other relevant euphemisms that have appeared within the past few years: "analytics", "diagnostics", "usage reporting", "connected experiences", "experience improvement".

Re: Why and how GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry

#66
Mandatory "do some research before jumping to freaking out at GitHub for 'spyware.'"

Yes technically you could use OT to exfiltrate data; guess what, you can do it with http headers, too.

Been using OpenTelemetry for python and golang. It's great. I really like using Jaeger for tracing across small ML webapps. We have users on the scale of dozens so I just trace everything without sampling. Way, way easier than going through logs.

Also used python + jaeger to narrow down some wifi issues on my home network. Basically run a server on each device and round-robin a request through each and look at the flame graph. Turns out, some Macs' location preferences can cause 500-800ms outage multiple times an hour, as it tries to scan know AP ssids or something. Yeah, dumb.

Re: Why and how GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry

#67

For anyone interested in learning how to use Open Telemetry for distributed tracing in go, I recently made a demo app to share with some friends: https://github.com/michaelperel/otel-demo . To run, clone it & docker-compose up

How much changes I need to make if I want to add open telemetry in my existing application?

Re: Why and how GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry

#70

For anyone interested in learning how to use Open Telemetry for distributed tracing in go, I recently made a demo app to share with some friends: https://github.com/michaelperel/otel-demo . To run, clone it & docker-compose up

Amount of "otel" instrumentation required in your code by LOC looks ridiculous to me.

Isn't it a better approach to just use logs?

e.g. defer ctx.WithField("path", path).Trace("opening").Stop(&err)

from https://medium.com/@tjholowaychuk/apex-log-e8d9627f4a9a

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