To say the folks at VictoriaMetrics aren’t big fans of OpenTelemetry after implementing its metrics library would be putting it mildly. “OpenTelem

OpenTelemetry Is Too Complicated, VictoriaMetrics Says

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2024-04-03 06:30:02

To say the folks at VictoriaMetrics aren’t big fans of OpenTelemetry after implementing its metrics library would be putting it mildly. “OpenTelemetery is so complicated and bloated,” said Aliaksandr Valialkin, the CTO and co-founder of the observability software company.

OpenTelemetry is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project that was created in 2019 to provide an open source solution to a thorny computer problem: to create a unified standard for the three main types of observability data, including traces, metrics, and logs.

With a single standard, the original OTel thinking goes, application developers will gain access to better tools to correlate different types of observability data with specific servers or virtual machines, thereby making it easier to track down and fix software problems. As a bonus, customers would no longer be locked into proprietary IT monitoring solutions.

OTel was formed by the merger of OpenCensus and OpenTracing, so it shouldn’t be surprising that tracing is the most mature of the three-pronged project, with the library tracing delivered in 2021. That was followed in May 2022 with the initial release of the metrics capability, while the general availability of OTel logging was finally delivered in November 2023.