A Survey of the OSS Tracing Ecosystem - Ben Sigelman & Ted Young, LightStep
summary
Survey maps concrete pieces: instrumentation libraries, collectors, storage and UIs. It states OpenTracing as a narrow, language-agnostic API with 9 core languages and 100+ packages; OpenCensus as a high-throughput in‑process exporter; Jaeger and Zipkin as competing back ends (Zipkin’s B3 format is a de facto standard and accepted by Stackdriver); AWS X‑Ray remains a closed cloud source; W3C trace‑context work has ~25 participants aiming for vendor interoperability. Traces often contain thousands of spans per user request in production.
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chapters (16)
- 0:00Start
- 5:43Example Request with Trace Visualization
- 7:52Tracing: the Mental Model
- 9:36Tracing: It's About Analyzing Transactions
- 10:16Tracing: It's About Recording Transactions
- 11:06Tracing: It's About Federating Transactions
- 12:53Tracing: It's About Describing Transactions
- 15:39Composable Parts in a Tracing Deployment
- 17:51Zipkin surface area
- 19:18Jaeger surface area
- 20:39AWS X-Ray surface area
- 22:19w3c "Trace-Context" surface area
- 24:57w3c "data interchange format" surface area
- 26:01OpenCensus surface area
- 27:06OpenTracing surface area
- 28:18Developer adoption pain (for tracing)
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