OpenTelemetry won observability mindshare, but it is entirely the wrong architectural choice: by buying into its ethos your code is held hostage by the least stable otel monitoring library for your dependencies.

Sadly, there was always an alternative that no one took: dtrace. Add USDTs to your code and then monitor progress by instrumenting it externally, sending the resulting traces to wherever you want. My sincere hope is that the renewed interest in ebpf makes this a reality soon: I never want to have to do another from opentelemetry.<whatever> import <whatever> ever again.

If some tracing plug in is shitting up your code with its monkeypatching, rip it out and instrument it yourself. We do this a lot. I’d say Otel packages are no better or worse quality wise than any other stuff in node_modules. Not otel’s fault that Code in general has Bugs and is Bad.

I'm not familiar with usdt, but my understanding is that it covers only the lower level of Opentelemetry. Is there an equivalent of OTLP for dtrace?