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OpenTelemetry for Go: Measuring overhead costs
We benchmarked the overhead of OpenTelemetry in a high-load Go application and compared it to eBPF-based instrumentation. The results may surprise you - tracing adds cost, but it’s not always a dealbreaker
To do that, I’ll use a super simple Go HTTP server that increments a counter in an in-memory database Valkey(a Redis fork) on every request. While there is a clear difference, it doesn’t look like a significant increase in absolute terms, especially for modern applications where memory budgets are typically much larger. OpenTelemetry SDKs provide detailed traces and deep visibility, but they also introduce measurable overhead in terms of CPU, memory, and network traffic.
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