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Comment by dmoreno | Hacker News Reader

If I understand it correctly this only species an API that implementors of the different solutions must follow, so that in your program you may import different vendor implementations. This allows easier change of vendor.

But no wire protocol is specified or anything like that. It is the duty of the vendor to create all the different programming language bindings and API implementations, and store the data from whenever it comes.

From my point of view it is the second part that would be more interesting: a standard logging protocol with tracing incorporated, and standard ways to pass along the tracing id (spans) to other services.

Is there anything like that?

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OpenCensus [1] provides an implementation for tracing and app-level metrics, a context wire protocol, and exporters for various backends. While it provides similar tracing APIs to OpenTracing, they're not identical, though there have been some early conversations about resolving this.

I'm the PM for Census at Google, though other vendors are involved as well. Basic implementations for Java and Go are already functional, with much more to come. We gave a small talk at Kubecon last month, but will start promoting the project once it's slightly more mature.

[1] http://opencensus.io/

Yes!! We are very interested in resolving these API differences. In my opinion OpenCensus is great and if it could become the “standard” client for OpenTracing it would make me really happy.

This discussion goes into more detail about commonalities and differences between the two:

https://github.com/census-instrumentation/opencensus-java/is...

The use case of non-request metrics is the biggest difference to me. While it's great to track e.g. resource usage for each incoming request, there are also workloads that don't fit that mold. Think of a garbage collecting background worker: either you use a separate API to push the data or you make up bogus GC RPCs to attach metrics to their traces.

I have to say, after reading through that, I'm still not quite mystified as to what the differences are.

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