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Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s

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Re: Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s

#11

Post by tecoholic »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #5
tecoholic wrote: post #2

I was looking into this just yesterday. So the Loki + … comparison is a bit off in the Open Source space. The main ones are Signoz and ClickStack in this space. Both using ClickHouse as the database. Heavy compared to something like Loki, but they are OTEL native and not log monitoring. So not in the same category.

I used Signoz + Clickstack on a vibe coded Go server project a few weeks ago. I just made codex figure out how to setup signoz + dependencies via docker compose. I even got it to pre-populate signoz with dashboards. It wasn't too bad. The whole thing runs with a few GB. I tried to cover metrics, tracing, and logging at the same time. This is not a production ready setup but you need to trade off cost vs. utility here…

I agree. The sentiment applies to most analytics. People who setup analytics are not the same as end users.

Re: Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s

#12

Post by sexylinux »

neya wrote: post #10
sgt wrote: post #7

Funny, the first thing I look for for infra projects like these is to find out if it's written in Go. At that point, my confidence level is increased.

Here's something better than that: https://github.com/plausible/analytics Elixir.

Why is it better? On the internet it is not enough to just say something. You need to deliver some facts and / or a comparison. Please try it.

Re: Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s

#13

Post by denysvitali »

At KubeCon Europe a very good chunk of booths were observability stacks. Everyone was claiming they're better than the competitors (with some of the just justifying themselves by saying "it's written in Rust).

Having dealt with Prometheus (+Thanos) / Grafana / OTEL and other stacks (e.g: custom solution on ClickHouse, Victoria{Metrics,Logs}, Jaeger/Tempo, Loki, ...) and even cloud ones (Google's Monarch rebranded as Prometheus)... what's your selling point? This to me seems like yet another way to re-invent the wheel.

If it's just for running locally, okay, fine, but when it comes to production (where the stack really matters) at scale, you end up with lots of tradeoffs and approaches.

Why is this one a winning one compared to the overwhelming "competition"? Seems like we're re-inventing the wheel for the 100th time instead of focusing on unifying the efforts in making the existing solutions better. Thankfully we now have OTEL, so at least the interoperability part is somewhat solved (or mitigated)

Re: Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s

#15

Post by yard2010 »

denysvitali wrote: post #13

At KubeCon Europe a very good chunk of booths were observability stacks. Everyone was claiming they're better than the competitors (with some of the just justifying themselves by saying "it's written in Rust). Having dealt with Prometheus (+Thanos) / Grafana / OTEL and other stacks (e.g: custom solution on ClickHouse, Victoria{Metrics,Logs}, Jaeger/Tempo, Loki, ...) and even cloud ones (Google's Monarch rebranded as…

I have tried to self host grafana (loki prom and alloy) as o11y stack for prepbook.app. This is hard. I have a bsc in cs not that it says something. I managed to do it eventually, after some research. It was not plug and play in any way. The docs kept saying this solution is not production ready even. I couldn't find the production guide, only the "forget about self hosting and simply pay for us hosting this". After I deployed it the UX was so abrasive my partner won't even try to go into it to figure out a problem. It was a few months ago. Since then new solutions have arrived and I'm waiting to have the time to migrate. I saw PostHog have a solution but I prefer something I could self host and completely own.

I thought how come no one is trying to solve this problem. It looks like it's just a matter of time.

With that being said, my experience can be very skewed since prepbook is a passion project running on a VPS with essentially 0 scale. All I care about is the UX of the stack, not scale. Just for context.

Re: Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s

#16

Post by danparsonson »

amne wrote: post #14

how can you claim in the readme "no per-language vendor SDK" and then link to a list of per-language client SDKs?

Aren't they two different things? Vendor SDKs to get the data in, client SDKs as an option to get the data out?

Re: Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s

#17

Post by yuppiepuppie »

denysvitali wrote: post #13

At KubeCon Europe a very good chunk of booths were observability stacks. Everyone was claiming they're better than the competitors (with some of the just justifying themselves by saying "it's written in Rust). Having dealt with Prometheus (+Thanos) / Grafana / OTEL and other stacks (e.g: custom solution on ClickHouse, Victoria{Metrics,Logs}, Jaeger/Tempo, Loki, ...) and even cloud ones (Google's Monarch rebranded as…

I was thinking this might be a result of the Cheap-money (post covid) era ending and everyone scrambling to reduce their Datadog/Cloud costs. Thinking back on 2023/2024, lots of companies were leaking large amounts of capital to those vendors and I imagine lots of people saw an opportunity for creating leaner and cheaper stacks.

Re: Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s

#18

Post by embedding-shape »

yard2010 wrote: post #15
denysvitali wrote: post #13

At KubeCon Europe a very good chunk of booths were observability stacks. Everyone was claiming they're better than the competitors (with some of the just justifying themselves by saying "it's written in Rust). Having dealt with Prometheus (+Thanos) / Grafana / OTEL and other stacks (e.g: custom solution on ClickHouse, Victoria{Metrics,Logs}, Jaeger/Tempo, Loki, ...) and even cloud ones (Google's Monarch rebranded as…

I have tried to self host grafana (loki prom and alloy) as o11y stack for prepbook.app. This is hard. I have a bsc in cs not that it says something. I managed to do it eventually, after some research. It was not plug and play in any way. The docs kept saying this solution is not production ready even. I couldn't find the production guide, only the "forget about self hosting and simply pay for us hosting this". After…

FWIW, I have no CS degree and barely attended school at all, and found Grafana + Prometheus + Loki fairly easy to setup, at least compared to what we used to use before those tools were available. Maybe it's because I used NixOS for the setup, but besides learning some new domain-specific things I didn't know since before, I don't recall hitting any particular bumps or roadblocks, I also went the 100% self-hosted route (spread across two hosts at home).

What exactly were you struggling with when it came to the setup? Just a ton of new concepts to learn which took time, or something specific to Grafana/Prometheus/Loki?

Re: Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s

#19

Post by ting0 »

denysvitali wrote: post #13

At KubeCon Europe a very good chunk of booths were observability stacks. Everyone was claiming they're better than the competitors (with some of the just justifying themselves by saying "it's written in Rust). Having dealt with Prometheus (+Thanos) / Grafana / OTEL and other stacks (e.g: custom solution on ClickHouse, Victoria{Metrics,Logs}, Jaeger/Tempo, Loki, ...) and even cloud ones (Google's Monarch rebranded as…

Do you think Prometheus + Grafana is the way to go?

Re: Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s

#20

Post by robertlagrant »

yuppiepuppie wrote: post #17
denysvitali wrote: post #13

At KubeCon Europe a very good chunk of booths were observability stacks. Everyone was claiming they're better than the competitors (with some of the just justifying themselves by saying "it's written in Rust). Having dealt with Prometheus (+Thanos) / Grafana / OTEL and other stacks (e.g: custom solution on ClickHouse, Victoria{Metrics,Logs}, Jaeger/Tempo, Loki, ...) and even cloud ones (Google's Monarch rebranded as…

I was thinking this might be a result of the Cheap-money (post covid) era ending and everyone scrambling to reduce their Datadog/Cloud costs. Thinking back on 2023/2024, lots of companies were leaking large amounts of capital to those vendors and I imagine lots of people saw an opportunity for creating leaner and cheaper stacks.

This is my instinct too. I've had the pleasure of using DataDog and the pain of negotiating with their salespeople!
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