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Comment by NeutralForest | Hacker News Reader

It resonates. As an intern I had to add OTEL to a Python project and I had to spend a lot of time in the docs to understand the concepts and implementation. Also, the Python impl has a lot of global state that makes it hard to use properly imo.

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> As an intern I had to ${DO_SOME_PROJECT} and I had to spend a lot of time in the docs to understand the concepts and implementation

That sounds like every single run-of-the-mill internship.

That's fair but I'll say that the time and number of concepts you have to deal with before going into the code, per the docs; is quite big and I think the critic in the article is warranted.

> That's fair but I'll say that the time and number of concepts you have to deal with before going into the code, per the docs; is quite big (...)

That's ok. It's the same for any domain you're just starting to learn. If anyone wishes to, say, onboard onto Cloudwatch or Azure Application Insights they will say exactly the same thing.

Sounds like you have been overzealous about it. I just read an intro article or two -- maximum 15 minutes in total -- and I had an idea about trace spans vs. logging vs. metrics and I was on my merry way 1-2h later. We're talking the first time I needed OTel.

I am not humble-bragging at all, in fact I was quite dim back then (health problems reduced my focus and clarity of thought), I am saying that over-preparing can make everything seem untenable. So just don't.

Tracing requires keeping mappings for tracing identifiers per request. I don't know you do that without global state unless you want the tracing identifiers to pollute your own internal apis everywhere.

Many frameworks have the idea of a context" for this, that holds per-request state, following your reques through the system. Functions that don't care about the context just pass it on to whatever they call.

I think Go was smart to make this concept part of the standard library, as it encouraged frameworks to adopt it as well.

Big agree on Golang. I had colleagues working with 5-6 JS microservices and they really wanted to keep span IDs so they can have sub-spans and unify semantic requests together (they also included background jobs processing) and they had to bring up a Redis container just to keep mappings of pieces of data every microservice has access to (e.g. order_id) and the actual span ID. It worked well in the end but it needed to be fully manually taken care of.

I understand that but if you look at the Python implementation (or at least as it was 1-2 years ago), you have a lot of god objects that hack __new__ which leads to hidden flows when you create new instances of tracers for example. I'm not saying I have a better idea but when you put that together with the docs and the (at the time) very bare examples, it's just annoying.

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