Otel is great for avoiding vendor lock-in and the spec stability is a long time coming — great to see. Also good there’s architecture options aside from side car (there’s also proxy mode), which is nice for situations like deploying on a PaaS.
That said the main trouble I’ve had in the past is instability in the SDKs. Java one’s decent. Go, not so much, for example. Traditionally Otel has been awesome for tracing but not so much logs, events, and even metrics (obviously depending on your language).
Other than that, auto-instrumentation has been nice. We had this exact functionality when I worked on observability at Netflix and made starting up and maintaining microservices easy and really helped with adoption.
That said the main trouble I’ve had in the past is instability in the SDKs. Java one’s decent. Go, not so much, for example. Traditionally Otel has been awesome for tracing but not so much logs, events, and even metrics (obviously depending on your language).
Other than that, auto-instrumentation has been nice. We had this exact functionality when I worked on observability at Netflix and made starting up and maintaining microservices easy and really helped with adoption.