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OpenCensus – Vendor-agnostic libraries to provide metrics collection and tracing

opencensus.io

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Re: OpenCensus – Vendor-agnostic libraries to provide metrics collection and tracing

#3
post #2

One of the contributors to OpenCensus here - feel free to ask any questions!

Really cool project! Thanks for sharing.

Maybe a dumb question (and I certainly haven't read enough): Any plans or projects that decouple language support from exporter/backend support? Bummer to see a bit of fragmentation there, of course can understand architectural reasons for it.

Re: OpenCensus – Vendor-agnostic libraries to provide metrics collection and tracing

#4
post #3
post #2

One of the contributors to OpenCensus here - feel free to ask any questions!

Really cool project! Thanks for sharing. Maybe a dumb question (and I certainly haven't read enough): Any plans or projects that decouple language support from exporter/backend support? Bummer to see a bit of fragmentation there, of course can understand architectural reasons for it.

There is! We’ll have an agent/sidecar available soon that means any exporter can be written in Go and only Go.

Re: OpenCensus – Vendor-agnostic libraries to provide metrics collection and tracing

#5
post #3
post #2

One of the contributors to OpenCensus here - feel free to ask any questions!

Really cool project! Thanks for sharing. Maybe a dumb question (and I certainly haven't read enough): Any plans or projects that decouple language support from exporter/backend support? Bummer to see a bit of fragmentation there, of course can understand architectural reasons for it.

I think that will eventually be solved by https://github.com/census-instrumentation/opencensus-service

Re: OpenCensus – Vendor-agnostic libraries to provide metrics collection and tracing

#7
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really cool project! Thanks for sharing. Maybe a dumb question (and I certainly haven't read enough): Any plans or projects that decouple language support from exporter/backend support? Bummer to see a bit of fragmentation there, of course can understand architectural reasons for it.

I think that will eventually be solved by https://github.com/census-instrumentation/opencensus-service

Exactly.

Re: OpenCensus – Vendor-agnostic libraries to provide metrics collection and tracing

#8
post #6

How does the tracing API differ from the open tracing APIs? Pros/cons as compared to that standardization effort?

"Open tracing" is a bit too opinionated by be universally useful. For example opentracing makes sampling decisions at the end of the span, not the beginning. Because of this you always pay the cost of span annotations even though the vast majority of spans are discarded. I think it's interesting that opentracing descends from the author of Dapper, and opencensus is from Google itself, and yet they've diverged on this and other details. Google of course just uses Dapper.

Re: OpenCensus – Vendor-agnostic libraries to provide metrics collection and tracing

#9
post #6

How does the tracing API differ from the open tracing APIs? Pros/cons as compared to that standardization effort?

The APIs themselves are pretty similar. The biggest difference is in the scope/goals of the projects.

OT defines an API that various tracers can implement while OC ships a single implementation that tracing vendors can export data from.

OT is focused on traces, OC aims to support move observability signals. Traces and stats are available today. Logs and error tracking are on the roadmap.

There’s a few other differences, but those are the main ones.

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