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OpenTelemetry was...dogshit. It was fucking awful. The support for async code was abysmal, which meant any well written application was a nightmare to onboard for it. Maybe this has changed, but three years ago it was terrible.
A lot of people complaining about OpenTelemetry assume that it’s a “fancy logging API” and are disappointed when they discover that it is something else. It’s actually a vendor-agnostic replacement for the client side of DataDog, New Relic, or Azure App Insights. It’s complicated because those tools are complicated. It’s especially complicated because it needs to support the special needs of library vendors, third pa…
It's complicated because the developers of those projects made it complicated.
A lot of people complaining about OpenTelemetry assume that it’s a “fancy logging API” and are disappointed when they discover that it is something else. It’s actually a vendor-agnostic replacement for the client side of DataDog, New Relic, or Azure App Insights. It’s complicated because those tools are complicated. It’s especially complicated because it needs to support the special needs of library vendors, third pa…
The client side of DataDog, New Relic aren't nearly as complicated as Otel.
What I wanted: Small library that just prints to stdout in a standard format. No network code in that library. A separate executable that actually sends the logs to wherever needed, and whose vulnerabilities can be fixed independently from my app. What I got: The kubernetes of observability. Load a bunch of libraries that connect to the network from inside your app. If you can't use automatic instrumentation then now…
The automatic instrumentation part is for tracing, which arguably is a _huge_ value add on top of logging, but is indeed more complicated to get setup.
Unfortunately I think OpenTelemetry doesn't do a great job in expressing the different parts of the project and how they all fit together (though this is the status quo in observability in general). I think third party vendor documentation tend to do a better job in explaining how to get started with it without needing to piece together the exporters, batchers, context managers, etc.
Disclaimer: I'm building hyperdx, an otel-based OSS observability tool, so I'm pretty biased in being pro-OpenTelemetry :)