I like the end result of OpenTelemetry tracing when using Axiom and the like, but the SDKs have been a nightmare. Too much emphasis on automatic instrumentation, Java-isms, everything is stateful and abstracted away.

It can do distributed tracing of otherwise traditional long running microservices, but breaks down when your functions are distributed like in durable execution engines, Cloudflare Workflows, “functions” that span hours/days/weeks and steps that retry many times.

I had to reverse engineer how SDKs work and how tracing UIs display data so I could make simpler functions that fit wider variety of runtimes and more freely parent spans, start spans and end them from different function instances.

I think most of the API and terminology complexity is self inflicted. Would love to see a rebooted developer experience that is less Kubernates-brained.