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We have a bunch of microservices where currently using instana collector for tracing. I am aware it is a broad question but even if I am personally supporter for opentelemetry I could not find any comparison between otel collector and rest of collectors.

What are the prons/crons using otel collector if we make a comparison ? If considering linkerd service mesh for instance is it better to use otel or instana collector or doesnt matter.

Any comparison and argument will be appreciated.

semural
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    [Disclaimer: Instana engineer here] Could you clarify what exactly you want to compare? Instana can ingest OTel data in a bunch of different ways and you can also use it completely without OTel. OTel itself also supports a lot of different setups. My best guess is that you want to compare the following two setups: a) (You service instrumented by OTel) -> Instana host agent acting as an OTel collector -> Instana back end b) You service instrumented by OTel) -> The default OTel collector -> Instana back end Are these the two setups we are talking about? – basti1302 Sep 08 '22 at 07:35

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TL;DR: It boils down to the trade-off between having all the components (receivers, exporters, etc.) available in the collector vs having a secure and (SLA-based) supported version of the collector with select and typically way fewer components. If you look at the 20 odd vendors only a handful have their own collector (disclaimer: I'm the product owner of one of those, AWS).

So, you can choose between using the "kitchen sink" (all components available, but you're responsible for security and performance) of OpenTelemetry contrib distro vs. a vendor-provided one (or build your own, it's pretty straight forward thanks to the awesome tooling the community built).

My recommendation: use the upstream otelcol-contrib collector for experimentation (I do that on a daily basis) and have a clear strategy (either vendor provided or roll-your-own distro/collector) for prod, with all the implications around support. Think for example of the impact the log4j vuln had last year and you get an idea how a 150 times more powerful agent can cause ops pain.

Some data points: I ran an OpenTelemetry survey this year (results available now via mhausenblas/otel-adoption-survey-2022) that shows ca. 50:50 split between upstream on the one hand and vendor/DIY on the other hand.

Michael Hausenblas
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One obvious difference that comes to mind is that OTel (as of this writing) has no way to correlate traces to the underlying infrastructure.

Instana will tell you this trace was served from this runtime in this process which runs in this container on this pod in this K8 cluster on this particular host. Having this correlation between traces and infrastructure allows Instana to suggest root causes in case of issues. So Instana's tracing is tightly integrated into the full product whereas OTel is not (yet).

Disclaimer: I work for Instana.

Gordon
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