OpenTelemetry
Vendor-neutral open standard and SDKs for collecting traces, metrics, and logs.
Liked as a single cross-language telemetry standard1 that feeds many backends, including Grafana's LGTM stack, SigNoz, and ClickHouse.2345 Complaints are scattered rather than common: some find the SDKs too prescriptive,6 raw traces hard to interpret,7 and self-built pipelines and exporters a real time investment.89
Why people recommend it
Backend flexibility · 3
Commenters send OTel data to a range of backends, from Grafana LGTM and SigNoz to ClickHouse after leaving Datadog.
“OTEL & LGTM, the same stack I use for monitoring everything”
Show 1 more
(I’m not the person you replied to, but have experience here.) I follow the [gateway deployment pattern](https://opentelemetry.io/docs/collector/deploy/gateway/). Everything sends telemetry to our gateway, which exports to ClickHouse (formerly Datadog). We use Node.js, so all we need to do is run a script initializing Otel before running the app. We set this up following the docs a few years ago, and haven’t had to c
Low-maintenance setup · 2
Setup following the docs needed little change for years, and emitting spans is described as easy.
(I’m not the person you replied to, but have experience here.) I follow the [gateway deployment pattern](https://opentelemetry.io/docs/collector/deploy/gateway/). Everything sends telemetry to our gateway, which exports to ClickHouse (formerly Datadog). We use Node.js, so all we need to do is run a script initializing Otel before running the app. We set this up following the docs a few years ago, and haven’t had to c
“we use OTEL end-to-end”
Cross-language standard · 1
Praised as one standard with close feature parity across languages, nicer than old vendor frameworks.
“I love OpenTelemetry, and using it in Rust has been mostly great.”
Caveats and dissent
Prescriptive SDKs · 1
One maintainer finds the SDKs and docs too prescriptive and obscuring that logs and spans are wide events.
“I also think OTel SDKs are a tad bit too prescriptive”
Hard-to-read traces · 1
Raw high-cardinality traces are hard for humans to reason about without extra tooling.
“we use OTEL end-to-end”
DIY effort · 2
Building a self-hosted pipeline is a significant time sink, and one user had to create their own file log exporter.
“maybe some kind of OTel, wide log, ClickHouse, Grafana thing”
“I try to use open telemetry with my personal projects in an asp dotnet as well as with a dotnet console app.”
Uneven backend support · 1
Sentry was not originally designed for OTel, leaving rough edges.
“I use both SigNoz and Sentry with OpenTelemetry.”
Browser log viewing · 1
A long-time grep user dislikes scanning logs in a browser and built a file-based alternative.
“While OTEL adds some nice things, I hate using my browser to scan through the logs.”
Often compared with
Who recommends it in their own words
Threads where it came up
- OTel isn’t going well 3 mentions
- OpenTelemetry for Rust Developers 2 mentions
- item 50195239 1 mention
- Show HN: Interactive PostgreSQL Permissions 1 mention
- Ask HN: What are your current favorite monitoring and observability solutions? 1 mention
- Observability Stack – AI First? 1 mention
Data: opentelemetry.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 11
“While OTEL adds some nice things, I hate using my browser to scan through the logs.”
“I also think OTel SDKs are a tad bit too prescriptive”
“taking in OTEL and scraping logs”
(I’m not the person you replied to, but have experience here.) I follow the [gateway deployment pattern](https://opentelemetry.io/docs/collector/deploy/gateway/). Everything sends telemetry to our gateway, which exports to ClickHouse (formerly Datadog). We use Node.js, so all we need to do is run a script initializing Otel before running the app. We set this up following the docs a few years ago, and haven’t had to c
“I'm pushing opentelemetry metrics which we use for alerting.”
“I use both SigNoz and Sentry with OpenTelemetry.”
“maybe some kind of OTel, wide log, ClickHouse, Grafana thing”
“I try to use open telemetry with my personal projects in an asp dotnet as well as with a dotnet console app.”
“I love OpenTelemetry, and using it in Rust has been mostly great.”
“OTEL & LGTM, the same stack I use for monitoring everything”
“we use OTEL end-to-end”