Comment by vanschelven
Comment by vanschelven 3 days ago
The article never really explains what eBPF is -- AFAIU, it’s a kernel feature that lets you trace syscalls and network events without touching your app code. Low overhead, good for metrics, but not exactly transparent.
It’s the umpteenth OTEL-critical article on the front page of HN this month alone... I have to say I share the sentiment but probably for different reasons. My take is quite the opposite: most value is precisely in the application (code) level so you definetly should instrument... and then focus on Errors over "general observability"[0]
I'm the author. I wouldn’t say the post is critical of OTEL. I just wanted to measure the overhead, that’s all. Benchmarks shouldn’t be seen as critique. Quite the opposite, we can only improve things if we’ve measured them first.