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.
Go has been incredible for building Traceway, glad you like it too
Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s
51–60 of 93 posts
Re: Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s
#52Funny, 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.
I'm the main contributor to Traceway, I LOVE Elixir! Traceway is strictly for monitoring your app, not the actual usage/product analytics. It's for making sure you know how well your backend is performing and to be able to quickly fix issues that show up.
Re: Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the disk? You've already failed by not running distributed. The problem isn't Prometheus, it's "the cloud is too expensive I'll just run on a single VPS"
Prometheus does not run a distributed tsdb.
Oh right, I forgot that even existed, I am used to seeing it as a layer that gets your data to a distributed tsdb
Re: Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really depends on the use case. Home lab? Probably. Production? As soon as you scale you need a proper solution. Prometheus (by itself) doesn't scale - you need Mimir or Thanos (or similar). Clickhouse (the "clickstack") seems to be the new kid on the block. Looks very promising.
Note Clickhouse is quite old (2010ish?) but they've always been a "web server access log analytics" solution. The pivot to "we do observability too" is new, we'll see how that plays out. Not terribly optimistic given how badly a similar pivot went for Elastic, but who knows.
I thought observability was shoved on Clickhouse by other stacks deciding to use Clickhouse as their recommended database for observability (SigNoz springs to mind but they were not the only one)
Re: Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s
#55Hi, I am the creator of Traceway. I've just realized that someone posted about it.
Unfortunately my account is being rate limited and I can't response to each comment.
Thank you for your support the attention project has received has been unreal.
I'll be responding to everyone as the rate limit subsides but I've made this in the meantime: https://github.com/tracewayapp/traceway/blob/main/HN.md
Again, thank you for your support!
Re: Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s
#56how can you claim in the readme "no per-language vendor SDK" and then link to a list of per-language client SDKs?
Hi, sorry for not responding sooner, didn't realize this post existed.
Traceway is fully OTel compliant.
Go: The original version started with Go SDKs. I've since moved to using Go OTel. I haven't updated those docs yet because the Go SDKs still work and are used in the wild, but they're on the deprecation track. Thanks for pointing it out.
Symfony: There were no good one-line OTel integrations out there for Symfony, so we wrote one. It is not a custom SDK, it's an OTel configurator. You can use it with any backend, not just Traceway. We're firm believers in contributing back to the OpenTelemetry community.
Frontend / mobile: This is more complicated. The current frontend and mobile OTel spec does not allow session replays to be sent, so for those platforms we still keep SDKs with a custom protocol alongside OTel. As soon as the spec matures I'm hoping to move it fully to OTel.
Re: Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is my instinct too. I've had the pleasure of using DataDog and the pain of negotiating with their salespeople!
Yes. Their sales people don’t even negotiate - they just tell you this is price and done. Dunno why they need sales person if prices are non-negotiable
It’s because you’re in a leveraged position. Why would they negotiate when they don’t need to. Tell them thanks and that you’re churning tomorrow and watch the “OH WAIT”’s come flying through the door. The insidious thing about datadog is that it snakes its way into your entire business line and so it’s really hard to extricate yourself from it down the road.
Re: Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s
#58I 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.
Agreed, it's a trade-off I am ok with for now.
In reality it's a very modular system, the telemetry repositories can be swapped out easily, I have implemented a clickhouse and a sqlite version (to simplify self hosting) so adding a loki like repository would be a breeze. It's not on the roadmap currently as I am putting a lot of effort into 3 diff parts rn.
The truth is that Clickhouse is an incredible DB that scales really well for observability data.
Re: Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 rou…
FWIW, if you come flying in saying you used NixOS to set something up you’re not what we would call a “casual user”
Re: Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s
#60I 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…
You're absolutely on point with this, I've made the perf tracking opinionated, so it comes preconfigured with SLOs that are good for most of the projects where nobody would bother to set them up.
Traceway has custom dashboards, supports otel logs/traces/metrics/exceptions fully, has session replays for web and flutter (working on ios/android now), has alerting integrations with slack/email/github, oauth login w google/github, and a bunch of other features... All MIT. None behind a paywall.
It has a specific set of trade offs, those are by design, but I am also always open to changing them and improving it. If you try it and have any thoughts the git issues are constantly monitored.