Author of the post here. That's a good question. I don't know if this approach is objectively better, but it has a few nice features.
* We generally favor free/open source solutions where practical.
* It is quite a bit cheaper in dollar terms.
* The actual code to make this work is very lightweight. By doing it yourself, you have total control, and can extend or tweak to get exactly the data you want. Being able to easily add bespoke instrumentation is really powerful. To give an example from one of our use cases (IMAP sync), let's say you wanted to cohort your data by mail provider. I.e., you suspect that the workload profile when syncing against server A is significantly different than syncing against server B, and you want to know for sure. It's pretty easy to take your codebase and your instrumentation, and add that by inspecting some thread-local context at runtime. Might be hard to do with an off-the-shelf commercial tool.
I completely agree about the bespoke instrumentation you have discussed here and this approach has started making a lot more sense to me now. I am gonna use it for one of our micro-services soon. Cheers for sharing this amazing post.
* We generally favor free/open source solutions where practical.
* It is quite a bit cheaper in dollar terms.
* The actual code to make this work is very lightweight. By doing it yourself, you have total control, and can extend or tweak to get exactly the data you want. Being able to easily add bespoke instrumentation is really powerful. To give an example from one of our use cases (IMAP sync), let's say you wanted to cohort your data by mail provider. I.e., you suspect that the workload profile when syncing against server A is significantly different than syncing against server B, and you want to know for sure. It's pretty easy to take your codebase and your instrumentation, and add that by inspecting some thread-local context at runtime. Might be hard to do with an off-the-shelf commercial tool.