[mmclean]

PM for tracing at Google here.

As the blog post mentioned, we're collaborating with partners on a common RPC context proposal for tracing systems [1]. Some of the major contributors are currently on vacation, but there'll be be another round of comments and updates once they get back.

We're also working with the same partners on a project called Census - a set of tracing instrumentation libraries that all vendors can use and contribute to, though we're still in the very early days on this effort. We'll have more to announce later in the year (still need to publish additional libraries, set up a website, etc.), but you can follow the progress on GitHub here [2].

[1] https://github.com/TraceContext/tracecontext-spec/pull/1/fil... [2] https://github.com/census-instrumentation

[puzzle]

OMG, Census! It's one of the frameworks you miss the most once you no longer can use it. There is some preliminary version of it hidden deep inside gRPC, but it's great to hear that it's becoming a standalone project.

[tonyhb]

What's the difference between this and opentracing? AFAIK opentracing is built by the people who created Dapper at Google, and the project also has a set of standards for HTTP transport.

[mmclean]

They're different in scope and goals. Census is composed of a context propagation format (which the blog post mentioned), a single distribution of language-specific libraries that include instrumentation hooks for popular web / RPC frameworks and metrics + trace exporters for various backends, and an optional agent that you can run locally to view metrics and RPC stats.

[dmead]

not having a tool like jvisualvm frustrates me.