from Hacker News

Saving Three Months of Latency with a Single OpenTelemetry Trace

by serverlessmom on 6/6/24, 9:52 PM with 41 comments

  • by harisamin on 6/7/24, 3:45 PM

    On the noisy NodeJS auto-instrumentation, it is indeed very noisy out of the box. Myself along with a bunch of other ppl finally got the project to allow you to select the instrumentations via configuration. Saves having to create your own tracer.ts/js file.

    Here's the PR that got merged earlier in the year: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-js-contrib/p...

    The env var config is `OTEL_NODE_ENABLED_INSTRUMENTATIONS`

    Anyways, love Opentelemetry success stories. Been working hard on it at my current company and yielding fruits already :)

  • by AtlasBarfed on 6/7/24, 4:01 PM

    It's AWS, if you shake a stick at some network transfer optimization or storage/EBS/S3 you'll save three engineers salary.
  • by simonbarker87 on 6/7/24, 2:19 PM

    I wish posts like this would explore the relative savings rather than the absolute. On its own I don’t feel like that saving is really telling me much, taken to the extreme you could just not run the service at all and save all the time - a tongue in cheek example but in context is this saving a big deal or is it just engineering looking for small efficiencies to justify their time?
  • by cdelsolar on 6/7/24, 3:05 PM

    μs isn't picoseconds, it's microseconds, which are a million times bigger...
  • by philsnow on 6/7/24, 5:24 PM

    Is latency the same thing as duration? I think of latency as being more like a vector-with-starting-point (a “ray segment”?) than a scalar, it’s “rooted” to a point in time, so it doesn’t make sense to sum them.
  • by Cthulhu_ on 6/7/24, 7:33 PM

    Given how high frequent this thing is, I'd say it's worth exploring moving away from Node; I don't associate Node with high performance / throughput myself.
  • by bushbaba on 6/7/24, 3:53 PM

    Just a friendly call out that checkly is an awesome service.