OpenTelemetry Performance Overhead: A Go Application Benchmark

This post benchmarks the performance overhead of OpenTelemetry in a high-load environment using a simple Go HTTP server. Results show approximately a 35% increase in CPU usage, a small increase in memory, and significant network traffic increase when enabling OpenTelemetry. The author compares using the OpenTelemetry SDK with eBPF-based monitoring, finding the latter to be significantly more lightweight in high-load scenarios, especially when only collecting metrics. The conclusion is that OpenTelemetry's overhead isn't prohibitive, but choosing the right monitoring approach is crucial, requiring a trade-off between performance and observability based on specific needs.