OTel TIL - What The Heck Is Instrumentation, Anyway?
Ever asked ChatGPT about OpenTelemetry? There's a pretty good chance that what it spits out at you started out as something I wrote, years ago. When the project started, I picked up where I left off maintaining the docs and website for OpenTracing and built the first few versions of opentelemetry.io (seen here in late 2019), including most of its initial documentation, concept pages, and so forth. Little did I realize then that the project would become as large as it did, or that everything I wrote would get repeated across the internet on dozens of other documentation sites, marketing pages, and blogs... and I really did not see those words getting fed into massive language models, thus ossifying a lot of the concepts that I wrote about into point-in-time snapshots of what a lot of words mean. One of these words, and the one I want to dive into, is instrumentation.opentelemetry
