OpenTelemetry Integration Hell: A Tale of Observability Woes
A payments company's attempt to integrate OpenTelemetry into their Spring and Akka-based system turned into an unexpected challenge. While OpenTelemetry aims to standardize observability tooling, legacy OpenTracing libraries and conflicting APIs across frameworks made the integration process surprisingly complex. The author details the integration of logs, metrics, and traces, highlighting the struggles with context propagation, API clashes, and debugging Java Agents. The solution involved manually converting contexts to bridge the gap between OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing. This story vividly illustrates how seemingly standardized tools can become complex in real-world applications and reflects the challenges of integrating different libraries and frameworks in software development.