As the creator and a maintainer of an open source tracing system, I would obviously have a conflict of interest if I were to advocate for everyone to run their own tracing backend. By no means would this be the right answer for all organizations. There are many reasons when it makes more sense to use a hosted solution; the complexity of operating yet another distributed system is one of the major reasons to look for commercial or freemium vendors that will take care of receiving, storing, and processing the traces for you. However, there are also benefits to operating a tracing backend by yourself, some of which I want to briefly mention here.
Commercial offerings are often, by necessity, designed as general-purpose solutions, aimed at satisfying the needs of many different customers. Yet every organization is unique in its history and its needs, and sometimes an organization may need features that may not make sense to others, and therefore...