"It might help to go over a non-exhaustive list of things the offical SDK handles that our little learning library doesn’t:
- Buffer and batch outgoing telemetry data in a more efficient format. Don’t send one-span-per-http request in production. Your vendor will want to have words."
- Gracefully handle errors, wrap this library around your core functionality at your own peril"
Maybe the confusion here is in comparing different things.
The InfluxData docs you're linking to are similar to Observability vendor docs, which do indeed amount to "here's the endpoint, plug it in here, add this API key, tada".
But OpenTelemetry isn't an observability vendor. You can send to an OpenTelemetry Collector (and the act of sending is simple), but you also need to stand that thing up and run it yourself. There's a lot of good reasons to do that, but if you don't need to run infrastructure right now then it's a lot simpler to just send directly to a backend.
Would it be more helpful if the docs on OTel spelled this out more clearly?
Top google result, for me, for 'send metrics to otel' is https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/metrics/. If I go through the the Language APIs & SDK more whole bunch of useless junk https://opentelemetry.io/docs/languages/js/
Compare to the InfluxDB "send data" getting started https://docs.influxdata.com/influxdb/cloud/api-guide/client-... which gives you exactly it in a few lines.