Observability with OpenTelemetry: What's Worth It and What Isn't
I’ve adopted OpenTelemetry on three different services over the last two years, with varying success. This post is the honest version of what I’ve learned: where it pays off, where the friction lives, and what I would do differently next time. The three signals, ranked by effort vs payoff OTel covers traces, metrics, and logs. They are not equally easy to adopt and they don’t deliver equal value. Traces — high payoff, moderate effort. The first time you see a flame graph showing exactly where a slow request spent its 800ms, all the instrumentation work feels worth it. Auto-instrumentation libraries cover most of what you need (HTTP, database, Redis, gRPC) so the upfront cost is mostly: install SDK, configure exporter, deploy. Worth doing first. ...