Comment by pranay01

Comment by pranay01 19 hours ago

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I think the biggest value I see with OpenTelemetry is the ability to instrument your code and telemetry pipeline once (using otel collector) and then choose a backend and visualisation framework which meets your requirement.

For example at SigNoz [0], we support OpenTelemetry format natively from Day 1 and use ClickHouse as the datastore layer which makes it very performant for aggregation and analytics queries.

There are alternative approaches like what Loki and Tempo does with blob storage based framework.

If your data is instrumented with Otel, you can easily switch between open source projects like SigNoz or Loki/Tempo/Grafana which IMO is very powerful.

We have seen users switch within a matter of hours from another backend to SigNoz, weh they are instrumented with Otel. This makes testing and evaluating new products super efficient.

Otherwise just the effort required to switch instrumentation to another vendor would have been enough to not ever think about evaluating another product

(Full Disclosure : I am one of the maintainers at SigNoz)

[1] https://github.com/signoz/signoz

PeterCorless 16 hours ago

This is definitely the same sort of take we have at StarTree (Apache Pinot, but equivalent to the Clickhouse story you have above). We're working now on making sure StarTree is compliant with PromQL (we just demoed this at Current 2024), plus also TraceQL and LogQL. Because, not surprisingly, query semantics actually matter!

https://thenewstack.io/reimagining-observability-the-case-fo...

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  • pranay01 13 hours ago

    > StarTree is compliant with PromQL

    do you mean one can write query on StarTree using PromQL?

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nijave 13 hours ago

Swapping backend is huge when you consider it makes it fairly easy to run a local setup.

One other nice thing about OTEL is the standardization. I can plugin 3rd party components and they'll seamlessly integrate with 1st party. For instance, you might add some load balancers and a data store. If these support OTEL, you can view latency they added in your normal traces.

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nevon 18 hours ago

Related to this, as a library author it's great that the library can now come pre-instrumented and the application can use whatever backend they want. Previously, I would have to expose some kind of event emitter or hooks that the application would have to integrate against.

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