I love that OTel exists, but I've always been confused why OTel even existed. If I were running a cloud provider, I'd put a "skunkworks" team on all things observability and log management a decade ago, and make their product free to use. It's not critical-path on infrastructure, so it's not a correlated risk other than the investment in manpower, but it dramatically changes how user-friendly your web interface is, and how likely people are to use it daily vs. managing things over command line or with third-party interfaces.
By bringing those eyeballs onto your cloud console, you're creating infinitely more opportunities for branded interaction and discovery of your other cloud products - you could even quantify these eyeballs as you would ad inventory! There should have been an arms race for each cloud provider to have the best log-tailing and log-searching and log-aggregation system imaginable. OTel could have been killed before it began, because Honeycomb and its other originators would have been acquired years ago and made specific locked-in value-adds for each cloud.
But nobody had this foresight, and thus comments like yours are absolutely correct. OTel is a blessing and I love the tools coming out. But from a cloud provider's perspective, it's a massive missed opportunity that continues to be missed.
> By bringing those eyeballs onto your cloud console, you're creating infinitely more opportunities for branded interaction and discovery of your other cloud products - you could even quantify these eyeballs as you would ad inventory! There should have been an arms race for each cloud provider to have the best log-tailing and log-searching and log-aggregation system imaginable. OTel could have been killed before it began, because Honeycomb and its other originators would have been acquired years ago and made specific locked-in value-adds for each cloud.
I think that's what Application Insights has always been, Azure's free-to-start, suggest-out-of-the-box Honeycomb. App Insights had a long slow road away from Microsoft-specific log and metrics ingesters that weren't OTel, but it is hard to argue that standard ingestors are a bad idea. App Insights still downplays that it can be "just a Honeycomb" using only OTel sources and still encourages "secret sauce" ingestors in addition to OTel ones. App Insights is a small moat (around a data lake; to mix metaphors). That said, it's also a standards-supporting tool now as well.
It's not been as clear of an arms race because AWS and GCP didn't invest in it in a similar way and it mostly impacted what are often called "dark matter" teams (Microsoft shops doing "boring" stuff that rarely makes HN headlines), but I have worked in teams that absolutely favored Azure over AWS/GCP with one of the reasons being Application Insights was an easy install and powerful first-party supported tool rather than an extra third party vendor relationship like Grafana/Honeycomb/Dynatrace/etc.