Hello! If you follow my rumbling here or on twitter you know that I like to speak about observability and tracing.
If you don’t know what I am speaking about this is an FAQ about distributed tracing and something about OpenTracing and OpenCensus.
Observability is the ability to figure out what is going on in your application from the outside. In order to do that you need to instrument your applications in order to expose the right information.
The instrumentation is not easy, there are too many developers and too many opinions, too many languages but in order observe a system that cross all the applications and services everything needs to come together in the same way. Otherwise the aggregation will become very a complicated job.
When you instrument an application there is a lot of code to write and inject, you can not do or change it based on the vendor or services you are using to store your telemetry: Zipkin, InfluxDB, NewRelic, HoneyComb and so on.
That’s why over the last couple of years big foundations and companies such as LightSteps, Google, CNCF, Uber tried to get their hands on the democratization of code instrumentation. First with OpenTracing, after that with OpenCensus and now with OpenTelemetry that is the merge between OpenCensus and OpenTracing.
At the beginning when this project went out a was very tired and stressed about the topic. I made a workshop last year about code instrumentation at the CloudConf and I wish it was easier to prepare and develop. At the end attendees were satisfied btw, so I am happy enough.
Since the beginning I had a very bad feeling about OpenTracing and OpenCensus, it is necessary as a project but the fact that we had two ways because they didn’t want to agree on only one for me was unbelievable.
Anyway, now that I pushed that feeling back I will give it another try. I will get my observability workshop and I will refresh it to use OpenTelemetry because as I said, we need a way to instrument applications, cross vendor and cross languages.
Here some link about it:
At KubeCon 2019 lizthegrey gave a demo about OpenTelemetry and I am confident that my experience will be a bit better.
It is not easy to democratize something, even less when you need to change the habit for developers across programming languages. But that’s the goal for OpenTelemetry and I think we need to get there and to make it a commodity. It is not a joke!
If you would like to help me, let me know!