Don't Wrap OpenTelemetry — You're Probably Hurting More Than Helping

There’s a pattern I’ve seen across many teams adopting OpenTelemetry, and it’s well-intentioned every single time. An engineer wants to make things easier for the team. They build a thin abstraction over the OTel API — an IMetric interface, a TelemetryHelper class, a MetricsWrapper module — and ship it as the team’s standard. “Just use this,” they say. “It’s simpler.” The intention is genuine. The outcome is usually not good.