Something I mention any time I'm introducing OpenTelemetry is that it's an unfinished project, a huge piece being the unifying abstractions between those signals.
In part this is a very practical decision: most people already have pretty good tools for their logs, and have struggled to get tracing working. So it's better to work on tools for measuring and sending traces, and just let people export their current log stream via the OpenTelemetry collector.
I think that it's disingenuous to say OpenTelemetry and Sentry aren't in competition. I think it would be good news for Sentry if DT were split from the project, and instrumentation and performance monitoring weren't commoditized by broad adoption of those parts of the OpenTelemetry project.
I think you, the author, stand to benefit directly from a breakup of OpenTelemetry, and a refusal to acknowledge your own bias is problematic when your piece starts with a request to 'look objectively.'
I think that a number of Observability providers are looking at how they can add features and value to parts of monitoring that OTel effectively commoditizes. Thinking of the tail-based sampling implemented at Honeycomb for APM, or synthetic monitoring by my own team at Checkly.
"In 2015 Armin and I built a spec for Distributed Tracing. Its not a hard problem, it just requires an immense amount of coordination and effort." This to me feels like a nice glass of orange juice after brushing my teeth. The spec on DT is very easy, but the implementation is very very hard. The fact that OTel has nurtured a vast array of libraries to aid in context propagation is a huge acheivement, and saying 'This would all work fine if everyone everywhere adopted Sentry' is... laughable.
Totally outside the O11y space, OTel context propagation is an intensely useful feature because of how widespread it is. See Signadot implementing their smart test routing with OpenTelemetry: https://www.signadot.com/blog/scaling-environments-with-open...
An argument that OpenTelemetry is somehow 'too big' is an example of motivated reasoning. I can understand that A Guy Who Makes Money If You Use Sentry dislikes that people are using OTel libraries to solve similar problems.
Context propagation and distributed tracing are cool OTel features! But they are not the only thing OTel should be doing. OpenTelemetry instrumentation libraries can do a lot on their own, a friend of mine made massive savings in compute efficiency with the NodeJS OTel library: https://www.checklyhq.com/blog/coralogix-and-opentelemetry-o...
In part this is a very practical decision: most people already have pretty good tools for their logs, and have struggled to get tracing working. So it's better to work on tools for measuring and sending traces, and just let people export their current log stream via the OpenTelemetry collector.
Notably the OTel docs acknowledge this mismatch between current implementation and design goals: https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/logs/#limitations-o...