What's the Problem with OpenTelemetry?

A week ago, David from Sentry (zeeg) wrote a popular post (opens in a new tab) on his views on the problem of OpenTelemetry. It definitely highlight some fair points (I’ve agreed a lot with him in our IRL chat about Otel’s issues in the past!) - but at the same time it felt that the post had a narrow perspective and the conclusion and I disagreed that the problem is with OpenTelemetry having too broad of a goal. Coming back fresh from Otel community day, I wanted to share my own perspective on Otel and where the true problems are for the wider community.

Disclaimer: I have my own bias in building HyperDX, but hopefully I can lend a different perspective to anyone thinking about adopting OpenTelemetry as either an end-user, tool builder, or observability backend.

First of all, what is OpenTelemetry actually? Candidly, I think the site itself can do a better job at explaining - so here’s my take on what it tangibly delivers to end-users:

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