tignaj
Disclosure: I am the author.
In languages when the context is implicitly passed (e.g. via thread-local storage / MDC in Java) Otel automatically injects trace id and span id in the logs emitted using your regular logging library (e.g. log4j). Then in your log backend you can make queries like "show me all log records of all services in my distributed system that were part of this particular user request".
Disclosure: I am an Otel contributor, working on logs (work-in-progress, not for production use yet).
An extension to OTLP that uses shared state (and columnar encoding) to achieve more compact representation and is suitable for the last network leg in the data delivery path has been proposed and may become a reality in the future: https://github.com/open-telemetry/oteps/pull/171
If you are interested in the topic you may be also interested in a research library I wrote recently: https://github.com/splunk/exp-lazyproto, which among other things exploits the partial (de)serialization technique. This is just a prototype for now, one day I may actually do a production quality implementation.
Logs are not going to be part of OpenTelemetry 1.0 release (only traces and metrics will). Logs are coming later (no specific timeline yet).
Disclaimer: I work on OpenTelemetry spec and wrote most of the linked doc. Comments/issues/PRs welcome in the repo.
Many tracing solutions settled on 128bits/16 bytes trace ids. Here is Jaeger's rationale: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger/issues/858
It is also recommended by W3C: https://www.w3.org/TR/trace-context/#trace-id
I don't contribute to Go implementation but I encourage you to submit the feedback to https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go or https://gitter.im/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go
You can also attend Go SIG meetings and provide the feedback directly. SIG meetings are open for attendance: https://github.com/open-telemetry/community#special-interest...
I am sure the Maintainers of Go implementation will appreciate your feedback.
It is true that the spec and libraries have been changing. This is to be expected since we haven't yet made a stable release. We are aiming for 1.0 GA release this year. The current plan is to freeze trace spec this week, followed by metric spec freeze in 3 weeks, followed by the release of several language implementations in 4 weeks after the spec freeze.
Like everyone else I wish we could release earlier, but the reality is that making dozens of companies agree on a standard takes time. I am very excited that we are approaching the finish line.
Autonomously Robust Software
Faster Protocol Buffers
Nicely articulated article. There is one observation that I respectfully disagree with - the one that says interviews are monotonous and boring.
I have done hundreds of interviews in my career and never found them to be boring. Perhaps one the reasons is I don't do scripted interviews. It is always an exploration for me. I will start with simple questions and if I get good answers I will go deeper and deeper into the subject matter or into the adjacent area. If I don't get good answers I will retract and probe another direction. This is sort of a depth-first traversal of candidate's skills with a heuristic to stop traversing a particular branch if I see it is not a promising direction.
My goal is to discover the area where the candidate is the strongest (obviously within the areas I am interested in for the particular role I am hiring for). It is very fun and almost never boring. The experience is always different because people are never the same. Yes, some candidates are just not good, but even bad ones are bad in different ways.
I know common wisdom for using scripts is to have repeatable and comparable evaluations so that you can choose the best candidate. I understand the desire but I prefer to find the best in each candidate and if it means I have to use a lot of gut feeling and intuition to make the final decision then so be it, I believe it still results in better overall results. The idea to choose the person I want to hire based on how many answers to my standard questionnaire they got right was never appealing to me.
I can totally see how if you do scripted interviews it can become boring, so don't. Interviews can be fun and it can be a creative process.
Another way interviews can be fun is if you find someone who has stronger skills than you do in a particular area. I love it when a candidate teaches me something new. Find where their strength is and let them shine.