What annoys me about otel is that it seems to require direct live connections. I'd much rather just add the tracking keys / spans / whatever to my logs and parse them out of there later, but no standard lib / app / process seems to like that idea. I have no intention of adding extra sockets to my requests when I can just dump everything to the logs as JSON.

So that's what I do, but instead of relying on otel tools, I have custom queries I run against elasticsearch (or grep syslog) using my trace tags. Works great. No multi-process visualizations but i can make my way through a process chain quickly enough