Open Tracing Support

[ascheman]

As a user of Maven I would like to trace my executions and collect results in a central place (trace repository) in order to learn about behaviour, e.g., executed plugins, performance/timelines, typical errors etc. Based on the collected data, I could at least understand where are bottlenecks and furthermore improve my builds.

Background:

• Having used Gradle Enterprise (aka. Develocity) with Maven in some of my projects and OSS contributions, and
• I now see the Maven OpenTelemetry Extension

Perhaps the extension is already the answer to my request. Maybe it is only the first implementation (or second if we consider GE/Develocity as well) and could find some abstraction and alternative implementations in the long run. For instance, both approaches require a remote repository to store data (in a sychronous way) and evaluate them. I could imagine local collection and evaluation as well, or even offline usage and (bulk) upload later.

I worry a little bit, if a recommendation for Plugin developers to extend their plugins in the Open Telemetry way, will restrict usage to this particular API. On the other hand, it is usually a good approach to get the ball rolling, make experiences and then improve over the feedback loop. Later the experiences made so far could result in a respective abstraction which allowed for alternative implementations.