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[Proposal] opentelemetry-go-auto-instrumentation #1961
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In addition to the eBPF solution there is also a code generation solution called instrgen: cc @pdelewski |
Before diving deeper, may I kindly ask if this would be similar in implementation to:
Edit: I have great respect for every project and idea, but based on previous observations, their biggest challenge often lies in the lack of a sufficient number of contributors to sustain active development. However, regardless of that, I am extremely grateful for the approach of auto-instrumentation in Go applications and I hope it can be sustained. |
The idea described by this proposal is generally the same as both projects mentioned above by @jiekun. We should rather focus on what we have so far, build larger community around it and improve. I would be very happy to see more people contributing. |
Thank you all for the comments. Sorry, I didn't notice instrgen before. I'll take some time to learn about it and see how we can improve it together. As @pdelewski said, @jiekun The principle of rewriting code of these projects you mentioned should be similar. |
Thank you @D-D-H. There has been a Go-auto-instrumentation started, with two approaches led by @edeNFed and @pdelewski. I would like to see you join the Go-auto-instrumentation group, which still has a meeting on the OpenTelemetry calendar Tuesdays, 9:30am PST to discuss this proposal. If this group does not have critical mass, we recommend moving this sort of topic into the Go SIG meeting on Thursdays at 10am PST. |
@jmacd |
@D-D-H Feel free to join any time you want. |
Hi, @jmacd @pdelewski @edeNFed I am an engineer working on observability in Alibaba Cloud, I have summarized the main difference between our approach and instrgen and the eBPF solution to the best of our knowledge and please correct me if I am wrong. Comparison with InstrgenInstrGen leverages Golang's
Similar to InstrGen, our approach leverages compiler injection to insert instrumentation code. This approach offers several key advantages for users:
Comparison with the opentelemetry-go-instrumentaiton (eBPF solution)The opentelemetry-go-instrumentation project leverages eBPF uprobes for non-intrusive instrumentation of Go applications. Currently supported library includes, net/http, grpc, kafka, SQL and etc. The benefits of this approach are:
Actually we have tried the eBPF approach for a while, the considerations that we did not adopted this approach:
Please feel free to comment if you have any questions. We would like to have more discussion with the community in the upcoming SIG meeting. However, the meeting time is not quite friendly with us. I wonder is there any Asia-pacific friendly time for the meeting? |
@ralf0131 From
Currently the most important problem we are struggling is to have more people contributing to |
@pdelewski Please see my comments in line.
I agree that the two approaches share the basic idea however the implementation may varies. I think maybe we can discuss about how to combine them. However due to the difference between the two approaches I am not quite sure how to do that.
That will be good. How would you like to do that?
Based on my understanding, assuming user has a function called There is another difference regarding how the instrumented codes are injected. InstrGen analyze code from AutotelEntryPoint and build the call graph, and inject instrumentation code into functions bodies.
Could you elaborate more on how InstrGen will do that?
I agree with that. :) |
@ralf0131 Please see my comment below.
Your understanding is based on what we have so far on the main branch, however there is PR open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go-contrib#4058 (opened almost year ago) which is more or less what you described above, so both tools follows the same techniques. Of course there still might be some implementation differences, but they are rather small from high level view. |
Hi @pdelewski , You're right. My apologies, I hadn't noticed your pull request before and my understanding are based solely on the main branch. I've taken a look at your implementation, and I agree that from the high level view they share the same idea. We're actually planning to open-source the latest version of our code sometime in June. This would allow us for a more in-depth discussion about combining the two approaches once we can see each other's work in detail. What do you think? |
Hi @ralf0131 , That's great idea. Also from timeframe perspective, June sound good to me. |
I saw a great idea and comments from maintainers here. As we know, providing auto-instrumentation for Go programs is difficult, but that's not the reason which cause the previous implementation being less active. I've talked to some developers before, and they haven't heard about instrgen. I assume they will also be not aware of the potential implementation discussed here. So, there are a couple things we need to consider:
It would be great to see new projects/impls, and please also consider how we could keep them active for a long period of time. |
That's right, I think we will try to add some documentation and articles to introduce the compile time instrumentation. We also submitted proposal to the KubeCon China 2024 and hopefully we can be there to present :). |
Let me share my thoughts. It seems that most people focus on ebpf right now, no matter that it's just harder from development perspective and has tradeoffs described above. Having said that, it has one advantage that might be important for some group of people, e.g no need for recompilation or access to source code. Another thing is that it's unfortunate that I also tried to advertise it during KubeCon 2023 in Chicago, however that's not enough. Blogposts, articles and more people involved might help change the situation. |
Just be curious, may I ask why
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I don't think moving |
@edeNFed Thanks for the clarification. Perhaps we should at least let users know, in the documentation, there are two approaches of instrumentation, one is the eBPF based auto instrumentation and the other is the compile time instrumentation?
Looking at the documentation of Java, there is also a Spring Boot page under automatic folder, which is not a fully runtime instrumentation. To my understanding, if a Java application is compiled into a native image with GraalVM, this process is essentially a compile time instrumentation. My second question for the eBPF-based instrumentation is, eBPF could offer a approach to instrumentation that beyond any specific programming language, why it has not been applied to other languages besides Go? |
just fyi |
From my perspective as a user, I don't think so. The Developers do not need to care about how Java's auto-instrumentation works. All they need to know is that they don't need to modify codes. In short, I expect the solutions provided by the |
The only thing shared between the eBPF instrumentation and the compiled time instrumentation is that they are both targeting Go applications. Everything else is different, the programming language the instrumentation are written in, the contributors working on the project, tests, CI, etc. I agree with @ralf0131 if the goal is to get more visibility into compile time instrumentation, making it more visible in the documentation is preferred in my opinion instead of mixing two unrelated projects into single repository. |
(sort of a side conversation, but just wanted to mention that it's not quite this clear of a distinction for the Java repos at least, where the primary differentiator is that opentelemetry-java-instrumentation modules are maintained by the repo maintainers while opentelemetry-java-contrib is a distributed ownership model where individual components are maintained by component owners) |
Hi all, Update: recently we have just released our first version of compile time instrumentation on the commercial side. Now we are working on the open source our solution. It is a bit late as expected but we are working on it. |
I'd like to note that @DataDog is up to extremely similar work in https://github.com/DataDog/orchestrion. This currently injects instrumentation for @DataDog's "properietary" SDK (https://github.com/DataDog/dd-trace-go)... That said, the code rewriting is configuration-driven, and configuration targeting the OTel SDK instead could absolutely be made. We (at @DataDog) would most certainly welcome contributions in this direction. |
HI All, Update: we have almost finished the initial version the compile time instrumentation approach. We are heading towards the first release. We are planning to introduce the approach in the upcoming tag-observability meeting (Tuesday, Aug 13 · 18:00 – 19:00 (Time zone: America/Los_Angeles), Wednesday, Aug 14 · 9:00 – 10:00 (Time zone: UTC+8)). Anyone who is interested please join to discuss. The meeting information can be found here. |
Hi @ralf0131 any feedback from the tag-observability meeting you can share here? |
@danielgblanco Not yet. Due to some technical issues, the meeting was not held as expected :(. We are working on a new meeting to discuss with it. We really need help on how to reach out to more people who is interested in the community. Any suggestions will be appreciated.
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This has been automatically marked as stale because it has been marked as needing author feedback and has not had any activity for 7 days. It will be closed if no further activity occurs within 7 days of this comment. |
@pdelewski Good day! Now that the source code of our approach has been available and we have published our first release. You can check it out and take a look at the source code, I think we can have a discussion on how to combine the our approach and InstrGen project. What do you think? |
@ralf0131 That's good plan!. I will look at your work and then we can discuss further steps. |
@pdelewski In the last APAC tag-observability meeting I have introduced the compile time instrumentation, the recording can be found here. |
I'm a little late to this discussion, but I agree that compile-time instrumentation doesn't belong under I think combining this project and instrgen is better than having a third Go auto-instrumentation option. In that case it is big enough to have its own repo imo. Then to it presents more clearly to users that your options for Go are runtime or build time instrumentation. It also doesn't make either option appear "preferred", they both have their tradeoffs. |
@damemi I agree that the best option is to combine both compile-time instrumentation projects (in other words, to have just one), as they are based on the same approach and achieve more or less the same outcome. From my perspective, having a dedicated repository for this project would be ideal compared to including it in contrib. One of the problems I've observed, which is partly related to |
Just wanted to add a note as a practitioner of OpenTelemetry for a large company for nearly a year now, I had no knowledge of As an end-user, I go to the documentation first and foremost while working. For any project, I expect that any features that the contributors/maintainers want me to know about will be at least referenced in the documentation. I strongly believe that I would be happy to work on opening a PR to add |
cc @open-telemetry/docs-approvers |
Description
The opentelemetry-go-auto-instrumentation project is an auto-instrumentation solution designed for Go applications. It empowers users to harness the capabilities of OpenTelemetry for enhanced observability without any manual modifications.
Like the opentelemetry-java-instrumentation project, this solution automatically modifies code, the difference is that this all happens during the build process.
The current implementation reuses the existing instrumentation for Go packages and depends on the package
dave/dst
to rewrite Go source code.The side effect of this solution is similar to the impact one would expect from manual code modifications:
Benefits to the OpenTelemetry community
This project significantly lowers the barrier for Go applications to adopt OpenTelemetry.
While there is an existing auto-instrumentation solution based on eBPF, it comes with certain limitations.
Auto-instrumentation based on code rewriting can achieve the same effect as manual instrumentation in most scenarios and is easier to use in production.
Reasons for New Project
Drawing inspiration from the Java language, users generally prefer non-intrusive solutions (those that don't require manual code modifications). Therefore, we believe that for Go applications, this approach is likely to gain widespread acceptance among users. Making it a project of OpenTelemetry, not only ensures better maintenance but also extends the benefits to a broader user base.
Repository of Our Prototype
https://github.com/alibaba/opentelemetry-go-auto-instrumentation
Existing usage
This project is under development and has some simple demos.
Maintenance
The original contributors to this repository will continue to be involved in the project.
Our current roadmap is as follows:
Licenses
Apache License 2.0
Trademarks
No Trademarks
Other notes
No response
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