Why and how GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry • Hacker News Board

Re: Why and how GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry

#111

Post by hendry » Fri, May 28, 2021, 1:44 AM UTC

bassdropvroom wrote: post #96

hendry wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can log and use a tool like AWS LogInsights to see the trace across services.. No code changes needed.

Great, so now link each request across services, combined with the timings of each individual component within each service. LogInsights is for logging, not tracing. Logging is not a replacement for tracing.

link request with X-Amzn-Trace-Id https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/latest/appl... and yes you will have timings also in the structured log.

I am effectively getting trace level insights from my logs. I must be doing something wrong!

Re: Why and how GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry

#112

Post by chrisz4 » Fri, May 28, 2021, 2:53 AM UTC

hendry wrote: post #70

michaelperel wrote: post #54

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

Once setup, I found that amount of code required for creating a simple trace via otel and logging is roughly the same.

Refer to: https://github.com/michaelperel/otel-demo/blob/master/cmd/se...

51: Start a span. Equivalent to one line of log 60: Add a event. Equivalent to one log 69: Set attribute. This retroactively add attribute to whole span since the start. While log don't have exact same effect, one line of log can be used here. 74: RecordError. Equivalent to one log

I haven't compare amount of code to setup a proper logger which connected to correct infra with amount of code to setup otel yet. Still, I don't think it gonna make much difference.

In general, I won't mind either approach if I get a great visualizer. The main reason I would choose OpenTelemetry is I get trace visualizers for free and I can switch to better visualizer anytime that I want.

Re: Why and how GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry

#113

Post by yannoninator » Fri, May 28, 2021, 11:59 AM UTC

scrollaway wrote: post #109

yannoninator wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that this thing is open source is entirely irrelevant. It's quite simple. You don't know what Github is doing privately with this tool running in their backend systems. I still don't understand the praise and the excitement of telemetry (open or not) at all from engineers. They may think that they are doing this 'tracing' or whatever that is, when in-fact it is still spying. Again, can I opt-out of this 'tel…

> You don't know what Github is doing privately with this tool running in their backend systems. What of it? You don't know what they're doing regardless. You're attacking a strawman, because of its name. Please for the love of everything, take a step back and understand what you're even arguing about. YOU are not the target of said telemetry. Their frickin' servers are.

> YOU are not the target of said telemetry. Their frickin' servers are.

Extremely naive claim.

What data do you think is included in their traces/metrics/logging with this telemetry tool? Do you know more of this?

You should know that a single blogpost doesn't tell you the entire story. What data are they collecting with this? Are these metrics/traces/data transparent? if not, why has GitHub not made this transparent?

Again, Am I able to "opt-out" of this telemetry on GitHub?

If I cannot, then they are spying. pure and simple.