Vendor-agnostic tracing (OpenTelemetry)

[jfsiii]

Instead of requiring developers to use a specific vendor, convert this (or create a separate) library to use OpenTelemetry.

Tracing is incredibly valuable, but for several reasons, isn't readily available for Workers.

I think the benefits are too valuable to be limited to a single vendor and too burdensome to ask developers to roll their own.

An OpenTelemetry-based implementation would benefit many additional people and (I believe) still allow traces to be sent to Honeycomb.

Apologies if this isn't the right place/way to discuss this, but I wasn't sure where else to start the discussion.

[evanderkoogh]

Apologies for the late response, but it wasn't possible to do this earlier because of a technical limitation in the Workers runtime. With the recent release of AsyncLocalStorage that is however possible.

I have been working on it over here: https://github.com/evanderkoogh/otel-cf-workers

[jfsiii]

@evanderkoogh if it was possible for to send them to Honeycomb it was possible to send them elsewhere, right?

Either way, I'm also very excited about nodejs_compat and was about to do try this in our project. Thanks for the link and work on your project. I'll take a look soon and see how it goes.

In case you or anyone else is interested, I had good success with https://github.com/RichiCoder1/opentelemetry-sdk-workers while testing but never switched over to it

Thanks again and here's to getting some traces from Workers to an OTEL collector!

[evanderkoogh]

Hey @jfsiii, oh it would have absolutely been possible to have an Open Telemetry exporter and change this library to support that. But that is very much what the library did which you linked to, so there was little point to change this library to do that.

But Open Telemetry is more than just the export format. It is also about specifying a way for applications and libraries to integrate seamlessly. And that wasn't possible before AsyncLocalStorage and what I am tackling now with the other project.