I did not find that manual instrumentation made things simpler. You’re trading a learning curve that now starts way before you can demonstrate results for a clearer understanding of the performance penalties of using this Rube Goldberg machine.
Otel may be okay for a green field project but turning this thing on in a production service that already had telemetry felt like replacing a tire on a moving vehicle.
My whole career I’ve been watching people on greenfield projects looking down on devs on already successful products for not using some tool they’ve discovered, missing the fact that their tool only functions if you build your whole product around the exact mental model of the tool (green field).
Wisdom is learning to watch for people obviously working on brownfield projects espousing a tool. Like moving from VMs to Docker. Ansible to Kubernetes (maybe not the best example). They can have a faster adoption cycle and more staying power.
Otel may be okay for a green field project but turning this thing on in a production service that already had telemetry felt like replacing a tire on a moving vehicle.