Monitoring Is a Pain
&gt; The problem with me and tracing is nobody uses it. When I monitor the teams usage of traces, it is always a small fraction of the development team that ever logs in to use them. I don&#x27;t know why the tool hasn&#x27;t gotten more popularity among developers.<p>I think there&#x27;s two primary reasons:<p>1. Historically it was too hard to get easy value early. That&#x27;s probably changed with OpenTelemetry since it has so much automatic instrumentation you can install. Even 3 years ago it just wasn&#x27;t feasible to install an agent or write 5 lines of code and then get most of the libraries you use instrumented for you. Now it is, and it&#x27;s fully portable across tools.<p>2. Cost, which still isn&#x27;t solved yet. Tail-based sampling is still too hard, but you need it if you want to do stuff like always capture 100% of error traces but get only a statistically representative sample of 200 OK traces. There&#x27;s some solutions for that today (e.g., my employer Honeycomb has such a tool), but it&#x27;s still locked away with vendors and too hard to use.<p>I do expect the narrative on tracing to change in the coming years, though. OpenTelemetry is growing in popularity and it has enough features and stability for a wide range of people to adopt it. I think the cost issue will also be dealt with over time.