[HN Gopher] OpenTelemetry
___________________________________________________________________
OpenTelemetry
Author : 9woc
Score : 37 points
Date : 2021-10-26 07:06 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (opentelemetry.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (opentelemetry.io)
| splittingTimes wrote:
| We are trying to get a better understanding of how customers use
| our desktop application. We are urged by management to use
| Qualtrics, but it feels like it is not the right tool for the
| job.
|
| How would you say does opentelemetry compare to Qualtrics?
|
| Is Qualtrics a tool where users need to actively fill out surveys
| and opentelemetry collects passively user interactions?
|
| There is also other names floating around in this space like
| DataDog or OpsTrace, where I am not clear how to place them.
| lizthegrey wrote:
| OpenTelemetry allows you to measure performance of your
| frontend and backend, but it's not a survey tool. DataDog is
| one of many compatible backends that works with OpenTelemetry,
| but you can also use Jaeger OSS, Honeycomb, Lightstep, and
| others.
| splittingTimes wrote:
| Strictly only the performance or can it also answer usage
| questions like:
|
| When customers go through this workflow step, they use this
| option/button 90% of the time and the other options are used
| rarely?
| lizthegrey wrote:
| Hello, Hacker News! https://share.getcloudapp.com/4guP9P6p (stats
| gathered from opentelemetry-js)
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Not a mention of "opt-in only, because we respect privacy"...
|
| Please stop helping spy on users! Be the change you want to see
| in the world!
| sveiss wrote:
| That's because this tool has nothing to do with "spying on
| users".
|
| It's a set of tools and a specification for instrumenting
| applications and collecting logs/metrics/traces from them. It's
| used to ask questions like "why is this page slow to load?" and
| get answers like "because it talks to the billing microservice
| which has a really slow SQL query".
|
| This isn't the same sort of telemetry that desktop software
| vendors collect.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Sadly, it seems you are wrong:
| https://opentelemetry.io/docs/js/
|
| "the browser"
|
| That means they are running code on my machine and
| exfiltrating data out.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| Define "they", please.
| iddan wrote:
| I really hope we'll have an open standard for tracing. Right now
| the common solutions are vendor-locking and can't be integrated
| in OSS projects
| phillipcarter wrote:
| That's definitely a goal of OTel! And it seems to be working.
| Anecdotally, OTel support has been very important for my
| workplace (we sell observability tooling
| https://www.honeycomb.io/) in terms of prospects. I think a lot
| of decision makers at companies are realizing that they can't
| afford _not_ to have vendor-neutral instrumentation.
|
| And tracing is GA in most SDKs as well, so you should feel
| ready to adopt it. Several vendors and OSS tools support it (or
| you can export your data to another format with the OTel
| Collector).
| lizthegrey wrote:
| Phillip also wrote https://leaddev.com/monitoring-
| observability/rise-openteleme... today, but is too shy to
| plug it :)
| Thaxll wrote:
| Open tracing works just fine.
| spullara wrote:
| I hate that this specification and most of the other ones use
| spans that have a beginning and end rather than events that start
| and end the span. What if it crashes before it sends out the
| span? What if it is taking a very long time to complete?
| beeandapenguin wrote:
| For the long running scenario, why not use Links? The
| specification describes[1] a similar scenario and how links can
| be leveraged to causally relate spans even across trace
| boundaries.
|
| As for the crashing scenario, this seems like an application-
| level concern. Ideally it is not waiting until the crash to
| send traces. Depending on the environment, the application
| could handle the crash and deliver the telemetry leading up to
| it before shutting down.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-
| specificatio...
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| You can emit multiple spans yourself, no?
| novok wrote:
| Data query wise it's significantly more complicated to compile
| 2 db row spans than it is to do queries on one db row spans.
| The library that makes and manages those spans before uploading
| can deal with those use cases internally if it wants, a lot of
| these systems have support for single point events too.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-10-27 23:00 UTC)