Comment by conor-
1 month ago
> 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
Just by bringing up k8s you are making their point. It should be dead simple to do logging without having to set up hardly anything. I shouldn't even need to know what a sidecar container is.
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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...
Yes but instead of just logging to a text file for example you need OTEL, thats my point.
The fact that Monolog has a handler for this tool isnt relevant, but it shows that there is one more layer of complexity tacked on.
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