I know sadly very little about otel, it feels “heavy” in a way I am not used to, I am used to simple systems - configured and composed in a way that makes a larger system.

20 years ago, we were doing (what I think) OTel is doing: with “hit IDs” (half way between a session and a request) that were consistently applied when logging the cause a request being fired; along centralised logging and really good timekeeping. Essentially a unique identifier as a tag that followed the request as it passed through the system.

This was enough to debug basically any problem.

We could even measure the distance between requests of the same “hit” and the total wall-time before it managed to return through the load balancer, so we could track our p99 easily.

Though truthfully we didn't make pretty graphs.

I sometimes wonder what OTel gives me more than this, but I work in games now and lots of these things that work well in webdev do not apply at all to our problems.