I am old and grumpy developer, I used to grep, split and join logs for decades and grep/awk to extract some stats out of that. While OTEL adds some nice things, I hate using my browser to scan through the logs.

During SREcon EMEA observed how vendors compete to ingest more, reduce storage size and price. I decided to try another way and create an old-grumpy-dev version of OTEL that is simple and just stores everything to files for me to grep. I had some ongoing Python zipapp projects with SQLite and dummy HTTP server so I used that as the skeleton. Fun fact: Python ships HTTP clients, servers and the asyncio loop, but no async HTTP server or client. I stayed with the batteries included and relaxed durability on SQLite to reach 3500+ ingest requests per second. AI generated the dashboard for young-happy-devs to feel familiar. You can do curl+bash install (I wouldn't) but I added docker to make it safe, you can build it yourself and some curl or --demo to fill in sample data. Today added Sentry errors as jsonl files.

There are more otelites on github, this is my take on what "lite" means. That's my Futurama Popplers and Zitzels moment.