OTeL also has numerous integrations https://opentelemetry.io/ecosystem/registry/. In contrast, Sentry lacks traditional metrics and other capabilities that OTeL offers. IIRC, Sentry experimented with "DDM" (Delightful Developer Metrics), but this feature was deprecated and removed while still in alpha/beta.
Sentry excels at error tracking and provides excellent browser integration. This might be sufficient for your needs, but if you're looking for the comprehensive observability features that OpenTelemetry provides, you'd likely need a full observability platform.
Otel can take a little while to understand because, like many standards, it's designed by committee and the code/documentation will reflect that. LLMs can help but the last time I was asking them about otel they constantly gave me code that was out of date with the latest otel libraries.
Prometheus is bog easy to run, Grafana understands it and anything involving alerting/monitoring from logs is bad idea for future you, I PROMISE YOU, PLEASE DON'T!
From other comments as well, seems it's still worth trying to integrate otel. Appreciate everyone's insights
Why is issuing alerts for log events a bad idea?
If you need an artifact from your system, it should be tested. We test our logs and many types of metrics. Too many incidents from logs or metrics changing and no longer causing alerts. Never got to build out my alert test bed that exercises all know alerts in prod, verifying they continue to work.
Biggest one, sample rate is much higher (every log) and this can cause problems if service goes haywire and starts spewing logs everywhere. Logging pipelines tend to be very rigid as well for various reasons. Metrics are easier to handle as you can step back sample rate, drop certain metrics or spin up additional Prometheus instances.
Logging format becomes very rigid and if the company goes multiple languages, this can be problematic as different languages can behave differently. Is this exception something we care about or not? So we throw more code in attempt to get logging alerting into state that does not drive everyone crazy where if we were just doing "rate(critical_errors[5m] > 10" in Prometheus, we would be all set!
1: https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/25.5.1/docker-...
I was at first implementing otel throughout my api, but ran into some minor headaches and a lot of boilerplate. I shopped a bit around and saw that Sentry has a lot of nice integrations everywhere, and seems to have all the same features (metrics, traces, error reporting). I'm considering just using Sentry for both backend and frontend and other pieces as well.
Curious if anyone has thoughts on this. Assuming Sentry can fulfill our requirements, the only thing taht really concerns me is vendor-lockin. But I'm wondering other people's thoughts