What Are Traces and Spans in OpenTelemetry?
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What Are Traces and Spans in OpenTelemetry?
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Re: What Are Traces and Spans in OpenTelemetry?
#2Nice summary at the start.
Re: What Are Traces and Spans in OpenTelemetry?
#3OTEL as a set of standards is admirable and ambitious, though in my experience actual implementation differs significantly between different vendors and they all seem to overcomplicate it.
Re: What Are Traces and Spans in OpenTelemetry?
#4Good article. thanks for sharing
Re: What Are Traces and Spans in OpenTelemetry?
#5The amount of additional code that it needs is horrible. We will now have to spend more brain juice on telemetry when working on a feature.
Re: What Are Traces and Spans in OpenTelemetry?
#6The amount of additional code that it needs is horrible. We will now have to spend more brain juice on telemetry when working on a feature.
Nah, if you have an important application this is very low cost for adding tons of insight into how your app is running.
Re: What Are Traces and Spans in OpenTelemetry?
#7The amount of additional code that it needs is horrible. We will now have to spend more brain juice on telemetry when working on a feature.
It’s really not that bad, integrating it with dashboards is where I found most of the difficulty to be (due to bad documentation). I spent 4 days on implementing observability for this new backend project I’m working on. OTEL logging, tracing, and metric emission took less than a day to implement, instrumentation was very well documented. When I tried to integrate with Grafana dashboards, that’s when things started getting pretty frustrating…
Re: What Are Traces and Spans in OpenTelemetry?
#8OTEL as a set of standards is admirable and ambitious, though in my experience actual implementation differs significantly between different vendors and they all seem to overcomplicate it.
Plus that tens of terabytes of data you have to store for a week worth of traces
Re: What Are Traces and Spans in OpenTelemetry?
#9This is sort of all just a reframing of existing technologies.
Span = an event (which is bascially just a log with an associated trace), and some data fields. Trace = a log for a request with a unique Id.
A useful thing about opentelemetry is that there's auto-instrumentation so you can get this all out-of-the-box for most JVM apps. Of course you could probably log your queries instead, so it's not necessarily a game-changer but a nice-to-have.
Also the standardization is nice.
Re: What Are Traces and Spans in OpenTelemetry?
#10The amount of additional code that it needs is horrible. We will now have to spend more brain juice on telemetry when working on a feature.
I don't really agree. It's mostly setup done once. Like configuring it and for example attaching some span generator to the library you use to talk with the database. Then future queries get it "for free". And just a single line if you want something custom if you have an annotation in java or using with in python for instance.