I'm wondering when's the last time you tried OpenTelemetry - and which language it was in? I'm not going to say it's super mature (it's not) - but I think it's come a long way from being a ton of manual setup and it's more akin to SDKs available commercially. Admittedly we (HyperDX) do offer some wrapped OpenTelemetry SDKs ourselves to users to make it even easier - but I think the base Otel instrumentation is easy enough as it is.

> I'd love an open source alternative. But there just isn't one for APM (which is our main use case). Nothing comes close. Every time I see "OpenTelemetry integration" I just close the page. Hours and hours of manual setup, code pushes, etc while New Relic installs once and works.

Depending on the language/environment/framework, OpenTelemetry Autoinstrumentation just works. It's the new standard, and lots of working is ongoing to make it work for everything, everywhere, and even the big observability vendors are adopting it.

FWIW most of OTel is pretty easy to use and set up too. OTel Operator over K8s that installs autoinstrumentation agents for 5 languages --> pretty easy onboarding.