Open Telemetry (OpenTracing, OpenCensus)

Definition of OpenTelemetry, OpenTracing, and OpenCensus

OpenTelemetry is a vendor-neutral API specification for distributed tracing, in particular for Microservice architectures.

The API is implemented for all major programming languages (open-source), allowing polyglot Microservice landscapes.

The traces are handled and visualized by a number of open-source and commercial ‘tracers’, including Jaeger, Grafana, LightStep, Zipkin, Instana, DataDog, and more.

Both OpenTelemetry and Jaeger are Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects. Istio includes distributed tracing based on OpenTelemetry.

OpenTracing and OpenCensus (a Google-founded open-source project) shared similar goals as OpenTracing, yet with different emphases. OpenTracing and OpenCensus merged in 2019 into OpenTelemetry. Since January 2022, OpenTracing is in the CNCF ‘archived’ state, only the second project to be put in that state.

Jaeger focuses on visualization with time bars/‘spans’ (focus: technical roles). Commercial tools offer more sophisticated visualization and analysis (also for business roles).

Viewing Traces in Jaeger (source)

Market - Current Adoption

While adoption of OpenTelemetry is difficult to measure directly as it is not a product, its popularity is apparent by the instrumentation available for a very large number of programming languages, the numerous tracers offered for it, the large and growing development community, and its important role in the popular Service Mesh Platform ‘Istio’.

Market Outlook

OpenTelemetry usage will grow as the need for cloud-native distributed tracing, telemetry, and observability becomes more and more visible (without detailing the differences between the terms here).