Possibly premature: How is the log API expected to be used?

[io7m]

Hello!

I have a fully manually instrumented application that's happily sending out metrics and traces. I'd like to emit log events independent of metrics or traces for the purposes of monitoring significant events that happen during normal operation of the application.

Will the logger and/or event API work similarly to how the metrics and traces APIs work now? By that, I mean, I've got an OpenTelemetry instance and I call getTracer() and getMeter(), etc, to build spans and create meters. Will the logging API work the same way? I assume I'd call getLogger() and publish events to it.

I can't seem to find any code examples on this. I assume that's because they don't actually exist yet. 🙂

[io7m]

I should probably add that one thing I like about the way OpenTelemetry is configured is that I can opt-in to metrics, but opt-out of traces if I don't care about those (by, for example, just not configuring an exporter for traces). I could imagine people running this application and only wanting to capture log events and ignore metrics/traces.

[jkwatson]

No, the log appender API is strictly intended for the use-case of building appenders for existing Java ecosystem logging APIs.

We are likely to have an "event" API at some point in the future, but that should end up having a much more restricted API than a full-fledged logging API, and wouldn't be intended as a logging API solution, either.

We do not intend to invent yet another logging API for Java, but instead provide means to write appenders that can output OTLP log records via the OpenTelemetry SDK.

[io7m]

The "event" API is what I was interested in. I assumed it would be introduced along with the logging API given that events are log records underneath (according to the OTLP documentation).

I'm actually not interested in the slightest in replacing something like SLF4J... It's barely used in this project anyway; anything that matters enough to be logged goes out via telemetry instead.

[jkwatson]

The event API is still a work-in-progess in the specification, so until that stabilizes, we won't know for sure what the API is going to look like.

[io7m]

Thanks!