[Donation Proposal]: Donating TinyOlly desktop observability platform to OpenTelemetry

[stevelerner]

TinyOlly is a complete lightweight observability platform for desktop docker/k8s designed to allow developers to easily see their telemetry and test out otel configs BEFORE publishing their apps to production where they will then use a production grade observability platform.

It includes a UI, OTLP receiver, data storage, and sample otel collector managed by OpAmp and one can easily bring their own.

It was written by me (Steve Lerner) because for many years I noticed tremendous friction when instrumenting and developing Otel telemetry: apps need to use a production o11y platform i.e. DataDog and when there are problems its hard to figure out is it the app? the SDK? the network? the o11y platform?

If one could simply have a desktop o11y platform to perfect one's telemetry, it would save huge amounts of time and cost plus prevent things like cardinality explosions... all while helping educate and proliferate OpenTelemetry.

I have spent several months perfecting TinyOlly and now would like to donate it to OpenTelemetry.

OpenTelemetry should include its own Observability Platform... one that is easy, lightweight, native to otel, open source, and can give a mini experience of a full platform like DataDog without the cost...

It is 100% ready and complete...

https://github.com/tinyolly

@atoulme

[atoulme]

I believe OpenTelemetry would benefit from such a project, as it would help folks discover and onboard with OpenTelemetry.

[vitorvasc]

I fully support this, and I also agree with @atoulme.

OpenTelemetry would definitely benefit from a project like this. I see other engineers struggling daily to validate their telemetry data in local environments, and this tool provides exactly the kind of "frictionless" entry point that is currently missing.

I'm transferring this issue to the community repository for further discussion. Thanks for bringing this proposal, @stevelerner!

[stevelerner]

thanks @vitorvasc !

I have trained thousands of engineers on OpenTelemetry since even before it was in release...
Adding a basic observability platform designed 100% around Otel and included with the project will solve so many things for so many people... and help proliferate Otel overall... Its like having an IDE for telemetry!
I'm fully committed to continuing development...

[svrnm]

Hey @stevelerner,

thanks for offering your project as a donation to OpenTelemetry. There is some history to whether OTel should own such a solution or not, adding the previous donation proposal and OTEP for context:

• [Donation proposal]: otel-desktop-viewer #1515
• Add goals for a OpenTelemetry Desktop Viewer/Development Tool oteps#230

The OTEP is the more important part to it, as it outlines some suggested requirements for an "OpenTelemetry Viewer" that is owned by the project. A summary:

• Collector Extension and/or Standalone
• In-memory/session scoped telemetry
• WEB UI to troubleshoot instrumentation and configuration
• explicitly not a production backend and not a full query language
• complementary to Jaeger/Prometheus

Note that I have not looked into TinyOlly yet, and this is also a personal summary I wrote down, not any official guidance. My goal is to set context and drive the debate.

[stevelerner]

hi @svrnm

Some answers below:

Hey @stevelerner,

thanks for offering your project as a donation to OpenTelemetry. There is some history to whether OTel should own such a solution or not, adding the previous donation proposal and OTEP for context:

Indeed- I've read the history.

• Collector Extension and/or Standalone

TinyOlly is 100% standalone for Docker or K8s on desktop. See architecture diagram: https://github.com/tinyolly/tinyolly/blob/main/docs/images/architecture.png

It is fully tested and functioning- I'm already using it!

• In-memory/session scoped telemetry

The design is basically 'tailing' the metrics/logs/traces with a pause button and search for that which is visible in the tail.

• WEB UI to troubleshoot instrumentation and configuration

Included.

• explicitly not a production backend and not a full query language

It explicitly stated it is not a production back end and does not include a query language. There are no alerts, no long term storage, and no templated dashboards that would be required for a production grade system.

• complementary to Jaeger/Prometheus

Yes by default because it includes a UI and OTLP receiver- its complimentary to whatever an Otel collector collects.

Note that I have not looked into TinyOlly yet, and this is also a personal summary I wrote down, not any official guidance.
My goal is to set context and drive the debate.

I like to think of things as "team build" vs debate, but I'm excited!

[mtwo]

Hey @stevelerner! We chatted about this during today's Governance Committee meeting.

As @svrnm mentioned, we've received quite a few proposals to add small observability storage and analytics systems to OpenTelemetry over the project's lifetime. We've always avoided doing so, both because it would increase the project's scope in a very different direction than we're currently focused, and because it could cause a significant drop in contributions from firms and open source communities that would feel directly threatened by this.

That being said, OpenTelemetry's core goal has always been to make it as easy as possible to get access to critical signals from applications and infrastructure, so that they can be sent to as many possible destinations as possible. We want to make it as easy as possible for people to build solutions like these and for them to be popular, just as independent projects. You should definitely add a link to TinyOlly within the OpenTelemetry registry, and there's certainly more that our community can do to assist, we just can't bring projects like TinyOlly or the OTel Desktop Viewer formally under OpenTelemetry's stewardship.