OTel isn't going well (and I made a spreadsheet about it)
The author critiques the current state of OpenTelemetry (OTel), noting that despite its goal of being a vendor-agnostic observability standard, it remains difficult for teams to implement. The piece highlights inconsistencies across different programming languages and the steep learning curve for manual instrumentation.
Why it matters
As observability becomes essential for modern cloud infrastructure, the challenges in adopting OTel impact the efficiency and reliability of software engineering teams globally.
For years now one of the most reliable complaints I hear when I try to drag a team off their vendor specific SDK and onto OpenTelemetry is some variation of: "why does it seem like this isn't done yet?"
Vendor SDKs for observability are, to put it charitably, idiot-proof. You install the thing, dashboards just load data, someone else worries about how all those pieces fit together, and you get on with your life. OpenTelemetry, by contrast, greets you at the door with a lot of "experimental" stamps and roughly six different ways to accomplish any given task.
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