I’ve seen an attempted move from DD to OT and it was a nightmare of undocumented features and little compounded issues. Tracing was non functional. It doesn’t seem mature enough yet.
I am a user of New Relic. Not because I'm happy. But because OpenTelemetry doesn't come close to the same features. Fortunately, at least OT is about 10x harder to set up with worse documentation.
yup at my last company CTO wanted to switch away from New Relic to save money for Open Telemetry and I can tell you we wasted months of work because OpenTelemetry is dogshit.
New Relic is really really good too, so it was even more painful.
I am not sure when you tried OpenTelemetry, but it is decently mature now, esp. for tracing. I am a maintainer at SigNoz (https://github.com/signoz/signoz) and we have good support for tracing using Otel for most of the common frameworks.
I agree it was a bit rapidly evolving in early days, but now its much more mature.
We had to use otel with Datadog because Datadog did not support Elixir with an official SDK.
There are a lot of subtle issues, but we've been able to work through them to get usable traces. (Metrics and log ingestion already have pretty good existing open-source tooling, like statsd).
There's some purposeful friction with DD when it comes to OTel.
Incumbents in this space are in for a rough time as more applications provide meaningful telemetry, beyond just logs. Fortunately for them that timeline is 'fuzzy' at best.
