Comment by throwaway150
1 month ago
Appreciate the response. But ...
> Since OP mentions logging, it’s worth noting that for instrumentation and observability we’ve embraced OpenTelemetry and have an instrumentation.ts convention
That makes it sound as though the answer to a clumsy logging facility is simply to add another heavy layer of complexity. Surely not every application needs OpenTelemetry. Why can’t logger().info() just work in a sensible way? This can't be such a hard problem, can it? Every other language and framework does it!
> Why can’t logger().info() just work in a sensible way?
I think OTEL is pretty sensible for a vendor-free and if you want to have a console logger you can use the console exporter[0] for debug mode during local development. Also if Next is designed as a framework to make it easy to build production-grade apps, having a standardized way to implement o11y with OTEL is a worthwhile tradeoff?
If you view that as being overkill, perhaps you're not the target audience of the framework
[0] https://opentelemetry.io/docs/languages/js/exporters/#consol...
Because making it easy to run and monitor NextJS is never in their interest. The difficulty of that is what pushes people that make it to production with Next onto their platform. The goal is to provide more impressive preoptimizations that complicate the stack more and make it more difficult to run NextJS yourself and actually use any of them.
I don't really know anything about self-hosting Next apps - but if you're deploying to k8s, it's not really that difficult or far-fetched to run an otel collector sidecar for your applications. It's already common to run some kind of prometheus scraper or other service to collect logs/metrics from your services but instead of having to have different collection methods for APM vs logs vs traces you can have it all aggregated in one place using OTLP format
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Again, why would one need such a heavyweight tool?
Most frameworks have powerful loggers out of the box, like Monolog in the PHP world.
What specifically is heavyweight about OTEL? At its core it's a standard for producing structured logs along with some standards for exporting/collection. The heaviness is really implementation-specific and can vary stack to stack
There's even a handler for monolog in PHP - they are not necessarily mutually exclusive
https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-php/blob/mai...
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