I needed realistic OTEL data generator for metrics, logs and traces. I also needed to speak native OTEL to a proto-compliant collector. But my issue was I need different permutations and I don't want to stand up many different containers or slurp up gigabytes of RAM. So while some the existing tools are genuinely good, they also seem to be very purpose based. So I couldn't find the flexibility I needed and decided to write a new tool.

The tool is called Snowglobe. The analogy is on an isolated system that you can "shake". It's a metaphor of the various knobs you can tweak: amount of data, amount of chaos, emit or omit AI spans. So it doesn't just do happy paths.

It simulates about 20 to 28 services because on the complexity the user chooses. I'm also trying to keep up with the always moving GenAI semantic conventions. One big part was I wanted it small so I chose Go and made it a single executable. There's a container too, that's 6.4MB.

Because I hope this is useful for people writing or dealing with APMs (consultants, developers, SEs) I opened as Apache 2.0. Disclosure: I work for Immersive Fusion, the original purpose was to light up our observability tool but I see it being useful for everyone in the industry.

One last thing, I originally called it tracegen but that name was being confused with the OTel native tool. So we renamed it for snowglobe and it's more fun to call it that.

So I'm looking for feedback from consultants, engineers and anyone dealing with OTel data ingestion and processing and visualization. I'd also like to know if this is total overlap and shouldn't exist at all.