What is OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry?
OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing are open-source projects used to instrument application code for generating telemetry data. While OpenTelemetry can help you generate logs, metrics, and traces, OpenTracing focuses on generating traces for distributed applications.
What is Jaeger OpenTracing?
Jaeger is a popular open-source distributed tracing tool that was originally built by teams at Uber and then open-sourced. It is used to monitor and troubleshoot applications based on microservices architecture. It provides instrumentation libraries that were built on OpenTracing standard.
What is the difference between OpenTelemetry and Jaeger?
The key differences between OpenTelemetry and Jaeger can be summarized in the following points: OpenTelemetry provides an instrumentation layer for your application code, while Jaeger is a backend analysis tool used for storage and visualization of trace data.
What is Span and trace?
What are traces and spans? A trace is a collection of operations that represents a unique transaction handled by an application and its constituent services. A span represents a single operation within a trace.
How do you use OpenTracing?
Using OpenTracingPrerequisites.Creating the Maven project. Examine the JAX-RS resource. Create the configuration.Run the application.Tracing additional methods.Additional instrumentation. JDBC. Kafka. MongoDB client. Zipkin compatibility mode.Jaeger Configuration Reference.
How do you implement OpenTracing?
OpenTracing is a vendor-neutral interface for the actual tracer implementation....Part 2: Implement OpenTracingStep 1: Create a parent (root) span. Let's start implementing our tracing middleware with OpenTracing. ... Step 2: Add Tags and Logs. ... Step 3: Create one (or more) child span(s)
Is Jaeger push or pull?
Jaeger has push-based data collection where trace data is sent to collectors, while Prometheus has a pull-based data collection model where it scrapes endpoints exposing Prometheus metrics. Jaeger's web UI comes with out of box trace data visualization and service dependency diagrams.
Does Jaeger use OpenTelemetry?
The Jaeger OpenTelemetry binaries use hardcoded default configuration that enables predefined set of components - OTLP receiver, Jaeger receiver, attribute processor, (storage) exporter. The opinionated default configuration ensures compatibility between Jaeger current binaries.
Does Prometheus support OpenTelemetry?
The OpenTelemetry Collector, or Otel Collector, is a vendor-agnostic proxy that can receive, process, and export telemetry data. It supports receiving telemetry data in multiple formats (e.g., OTLP, Jaeger, Prometheus, as well as many commercial/proprietary tools) and sending data to one or more backends.
What is a trace in telemetry?
A trace is a collection of linked spans, which are named and timed operations that represent a unit of work in the request. A span that isn't the child of any other span is the parent span, or root span, of the trace.
What is a span in cloud?
Span: The basic unit of work. For example, sending an RPC is a new span, as is sending a response to an RPC. Spans are identified by a unique 64-bit ID for the span and another 64-bit ID for the trace the span is a part of.
What is span context?
Span context represents the data required for moving trace information across service boundaries. Span context contains the following metadata: traceID : the trace identifier of the span context. spanID : the span identifier of the span context. traceFlags : the trace options for the span context.
What is Jaeger in Kubernetes?
The Jaeger Operator is an implementation of a Kubernetes Operator. Operators are pieces of software that ease the operational complexity of running another piece of software. More technically, Operators are a method of packaging, deploying, and managing a Kubernetes application.
What is the purpose of Jaeger?
Jaeger is software that you can use to monitor and troubleshoot problems on interconnected software components called microservices. Several microservices communicate with each other to complete a single software function.
What is Jaeger in Microservices?
Jaeger is a distributed tracing tool meant to monitor and troubleshoot transactions in a microservice architecture. It was developed by teams at Uber and then open-sourced in 2015. It was accepted as a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Incubation project in 2017 and was promoted to graduate status in 2019.
What is difference between Jaeger and zipkin?
Zipkin provides Docker images and Java programs. Unlike Jaeger, Zipkin is a single process that includes the collector, storage, API, and UI. This makes deployment easier, but the story is less clear. Jaeger has a dedicated deployment documentation section.
Why OpenTracing?
OpenTracing is a standardised API that describes how to structure tracing information within a distributed system environment and how a requests can cross process boundaries. OpenTracing allows us to separate the data that is being collected from the mechanism that collects and does something with that data.
CNCF
Cloud Native Computing Foundation ( CNCF) is a community of open source software projects built with containers and forming part of a microservices ecosystem from the start. It’s a valuable resource that enables projects to collaborate with talented engineers and gain visibility while they mature.
Next Steps
Now we’ve explored the reasons why Couchbase selected OpenTracing as our tracing API and what it has enabled us to provide to our users, we can discuss how to use the out of the box tracer and how to integrate with other tracer solutions.
Author
Mike Goldsmith is a Senior SDK Engineer at Couchbase with extensive big data project experience. Recently Mike really enjoyed working with Docker.
What is OpenTracing?
OpenTracing is a standard for vendor-neutral APIs and instrumentation for distributed tracing. OpenTracing allows developers of application code, OSS packages, and OSS services to instrument their own code without binding to any particular tracing vendor. The OpenTracing was created by the OSS community, including LightStep CEO and Co-Founder Ben Sigelman, and is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) incubating project.
What is Opentracing and OpenCensus?
OpenTracing has helped those adopting microservices and serverless more easily – and portably – instrument their software for distributed tracing. OpenCensus (a Google-founded OSS project) shared similar goals with different emphases, as well as a broader effort to standardize metrics and logging. OpenTracing and OpenCensus have merged to form OpenTelemetry, which is backwards compatible with OpenTracing.
What is trace transformation?
Traces Transformed. Aggregate, analyze, and visualize thousands of traces in order to answer specific, high-value questions about the health of your services or system.
Who is the founder of OpenTracing?
The OpenTracing was created by the OSS community, including LightStep CEO and Co-Founder Ben Sigelman, and is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) incubating project.
What is Lightstep tracing?
Lightstep tracing provides complete visibility and context into your system, whether you’re migrating to microservices or have a complex, multi-cloud environment.
What is a tracer in OpenTracing?
All OpenTracing compatible tracers must provide a client with the implementation of the Tracer interface.
Why is local data transported along the full path as request?
However, this powerful feature should be used carefully because it can easily saturate network links if the propagated items are about to be injected into many descendant spans.
Can you swap out Opentracing?
Since the job of the OpenTracing API is to hide the differences between distributed tracer implementations, so you can easily swap them out at any time without needing to change your instrumentation, one should look into OpenTracing-compatible distributed tracers options.
Is Jaeger a distributed tracer?
Zipkin and Jaeger are both such OpenTracing-compatible distributed tracers. If you want to learn more about them, we covered Zipkin as OpenTracing-compatible Distributed Tracer, followed by Jaeger as distributed tracer and also did a comparison of Jaeger vs Zipkin head to head!
What is OpenTracing?
Consistent, expressive, vendor-neutral APIs for distributed tracing and context propagation.
OpenTracing Integrations
Golang, Express Gateway, LightStep, Akutan, and Helidon are some of the popular tools that integrate with OpenTracing. Here's a list of all 5 tools that integrate with OpenTracing.
What is OpenTracing?
OpenTracing is a set of standards and techniques that allow for distributed tracing in a way that’s free of vendor lock-in. For that purpose, a coherent API specification is provided for numerous programming languages and frameworks.
OpenTracing Benefits
OpenTracing aims to offer a consistent, unified and tracer-agnostic instrumentation API for a wide range of frameworks, platforms and programming languages.
OpenTracing and Distributed Context Propagation
One of the most compelling and powerful features attributed to tracing systems is distributed context propagation. Context propagation composes the causal chain and dissects the transaction from inception to finalization – it illuminates the request’s path until its final destination.
Adoption: Who uses OpenTracing
As organizations are embracing the cloud-native movement and thus migrating their applications from monolithic to microservice architectures, the need for general visibility and observability into software behavior becomes an essential requirement.
Next steps
Cloud-native paradigm is creating a new reality and mindset of how software is built and deployed. Instead of static VM-centric infrastructures, the containers are first-class citizens in the world of programmable, automated, immutable infrastructure as code.
How does Opentracing work?
Working to make switching tracers without changing code easy, OpenTracing does this by forming a common language around what a trace is. As the official project website states, “Traces in OpenTracing are defined implicitly by their Spans. In particular, a Trace can be thought of as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of Spans, where the edges between Spans are called References.” The relationships of these references and spans expand from there to include each behavior as a “method” in a typical programming language. With OpenTracing, now your team can apply a single API at both service and application level, as mentioned above, and manage observability with multiple collecting and storing techniques as long as the API is compatible with your specified language.
What is a trace in a span?
Traces – records of requests and interactions made of spans.
What is OpenCensus used for?
While OpenCensus is built to include multiple backend exports automatically, it only supports the collection of various data types based on the backend and language. Newer on the scene, OpenMetrics aims to standardize the format for metric data. It is ideally used in conjunction with OpenTracing and in the future is expected to replace Prometheus ...
Why is API important in tracing?
Further, this application is ideal because it gives the opportunity for teams to use and adapt tools for tracing as they evolve, meaning that you can try out a number of tools without the risk of becoming attached to code in a specific language or library.
What is observability in software?
A process of software maintenance that came along with the influx of cloud-based systems , observability is a move to solve the issue of it becoming harder and harder to monitor software as it is spread across multiple servers and microservices. Essentially a subset of monitoring that can be broken down into the action of observing and gathering three types of data in order to ensure the instrumentation, performance, and health of a system – observability includes:
Is OpenCensus a data insight?
However, OpenCensus provides more than just data insight.”. In fact, this project is expanding the ability for developers and IT professionals to adopt tracing tools with automatic gathering based on a language as well as leverage metrics.
What is OpenTracing?
OpenTracing was a standard for tracing distributed trace events (here a distributed trace by its definition includes more than one transaction occurring across various parts of a system).
Why was OpenTracing sunsetted?
As OpenTelemetry was able to provide all of the benefits of both OpenCensus and OpenTracing, it made it much easier for many engineers to switch over and use the newer project rather than choose between using the two older solutions.
What solution should I use instead of OpenTracing?
OpenTelemetry takes over from its predecessors, OpenTracing & OpenCensus and thus should be used for ongoing distributing tracing activities.
OpenTelemetry vs OpenTracing
Due to the history of OpenTracing in these regards, when it comes to comparing OpenTelemetry vs OpenTracing, we have to look at it as more of an evolution of one tool evolving into another rather than an exact comparison.
Jaeger vs OpenTracing
It is important to keep in mind that OpenTracing & Jaeger have a number of differences which will be discussed in the following sections in order to avoid confusion between the two.
OpenTracing API
Traces, Spans, and Edges
- In a distributed system, a trace encapsulates the transaction’s state as it propagates through the system. During the journey of the transaction, it can create one or multiple spans. A span represents a single unit of work inside a transaction, for example, an RPC client/server call, sending query to the database server, or publishing a message to the message bus. Speaking in …
OpenTracing Tags
- Spans may contain tags that represent contextual metadata relevant to a specific request. They consist of an unbounded sequence of key-value pairs, where keys are strings and values can be strings, numbers, booleans or date data types. Tags allow for context enrichment that may be useful for monitoring or debugging system behavior. While not mandat...
OpenTracing Logging /Log Events
- Besides tags, OpenTracing has a notion of log events. They represent timestamped textual (although not limited to textual content) annotations that may be recorded along the duration of a span. Events could express any occurrence of interest to the active span, like timer expiration, cache miss events, build or deployment starting events, etc.
OpenTracing Baggage
- Baggage items allow for cross-span propagation, i.e., they let associate metadata that also propagates to future children of the root span. In other words, the local data is transported along the full path as request if traveling downstream through the system. However, this powerful feature should be used carefully because it can easily saturate network links if the propagated it…
Conclusion
- OpenTracing has its own jargon and a set of concepts that we should become familiar with in order to fully understand and exploit its capabilities. Tags make it possible to attach any piece of metadata to outbound span, and we can even bind events and logs to the particular lifespan. Baggage items are a powerful feature that allows for the propagation of common tags from the …
Next Steps
- Zipkin and Jaeger are both such OpenTracing-compatible distributed tracers. If you want to learn more about them, we covered Zipkin as OpenTracing-compatible Distributed Tracer, followed by Jaeger as distributed tracer and also did acomparison of Jaeger vs Zipkin head to head! If you are looking for a Full Stack Observability platform that brings together traces, logs, metrics, and use…