Does this put "telemetry" in Git itself? If you're just using git to access Github, is it snooping on you?
Why and how GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry
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Re: Why and how GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry
#12A 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 like this going forwards, from all kinds of companies.
As for concerns about user tracking & privacy, that's not generally what these operational tools are used for. I haven't heard of a single case of them being used for user tracking or behavioral analytics. Thusfar these are purely operational tools, to understand the health of systems, to debug & typically to understand what happens to an incoming request as it works through dozens of systems & services to get processed. That said, I tend to think over time the importance of this distributed after-the-fact log we are building is going to become inverted. That we will start to see the potential to harvest these records for analytics, and more generally, to forward-feed them into other processes to automatically build & advance Event Sourcing systems. Right now these systems are relatively pure & good, but what's really at stake here is that we've been doing computing blind, with no record of what's happened, and OpenTelemetry is a key first step in lifting that veil of ignorance as to what computing has happened. We are beginning to capture the data of what compute occurred. Many things will emerge as we open this box.
Re: Why and how GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
even if they did, that would't mean anything. They could easily construct an argument that surfacing ads serves to improve the application (with a few extra rethoric steps in between).
If a company is serious about this type of promise, they should take away their ability to change their mind in the future with a Ulysses pact [1]. See this[2] older post where for a bit more detail from a talk by Cory Doctorow. >> The answer to not getting pressure from your bosses, your stakeholders, your investors or your members, to do the wrong thing later, when times are hard, is to take options off the table r…
How would that be implemented in practice, for the case of telemetry? The data is held by a third party? Couldn't they always "buy" that third party? Is there a standard Ulysses mechanism for data compartmentalization?
Re: Why and how GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry
#14Does 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.
Re: Why and how GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry
#15I 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).
As someone who's needed to maintain complex, high-performance database drivers that needed to work across a bunch of different platforms, I've been following them and their predecessors of OpenTracing/OpenCensus. The problem that's always been interesting to me as a library maintainer is consistency across platforms and well maintained multi-platform libraries.
I hadn't really found an acceptable solution that would work across Java, Node.js, browser, and so on. We'd invented our own formats and then we owned all the integration problems with various monitoring tools. I left the team before we started to adopt, but they've started doing it and it looks like it's help with reducing integration burden. I also think using someone else's opinionated library can help avoid bikeshedding on concepts not related to your core value.
Re: Why and how GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry
#16Does this put "telemetry" in Git itself? If you're just using git to access Github, is it snooping on you?
Add to this that it’s Microsoft owned.
Re: Why and how GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry
#17Off topic: At some point my wasm app was consuming excessive memory bringing the browser to a halt. The issue was the OpenTelemetry package(Go-lang) used by various Google sdks. Forking/sanitizing the sdks fixed the issue.
Re: Why and how GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry
#18Considering GH is MS-owned, i'm even more reluctant to use it. Anything that leaves your computer and enters hardware owned by MS should make you think twice about using a certain service/product. Same goes for almost every other company out there.Also FOMO is not an argument, there are plenty of alternatives for almost everything out there.If it's comfort people are worried about then they should stick to iPads and…
I think you have a misunderstanding of what OpenTelemetry is. It helps you understand what your backend software is doing with insights like how long database queries take to complete.
Re: Why and how GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry
#19I 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've noticed that orgs where I've worked vary between being totally insensitive to observability cost to being real hardasses about it. But I think most smaller shops are falling into the former category. I've even heard in meetings crazy shit like "It's very low overhead, only about 5%" which would get you laughed out of the office at, say, Google. Unfortunately (to me) the focus on ease-of-use has meant that OpenTelemetry concepts are structured in such a way to preclude even the possibility of a very efficient implementation, which means that there will be a schism between people who are happy in the otel ecosystem and people who can't use it on cost grounds, who probably will splinter into distinct home-grown solutions.
Re: Why and how GitHub is adopting OpenTelemetry
#20A 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…
> As for concerns about user tracking & privacy, that's not generally what these operational tools are used for.
I'm not sure that the intended use matters. Unless the telemetry systems are carefully designed to not capture PII at all they become yet another channel that must be secured as if they are collecting PII. For example, see Windows 10 telemetry vs. HIPPA: https://hipaaone.com/2015/09/22/windows-10-and-hipaa/