[sciurus]

OpenCensus seems like it's really a Google-only project. OpenTracing and OpenMetrics appear to have more community and vendor engagement.

E.G. Datadog is basing their newer tracing libraries on OpenTracing, and Prometheus devs are behind OpenMetrics.

[manigandham]

That's exactly the fragmentation that we don't need. OpenCensus has backing from Microsoft too and is a designed as a single API and library to support both tracing and metrics using the same context.

OpenTracing and OpenMetrics are more like API specs with libraries left to others to implement, and they're never really used standalone for them to be separate projects. The best option for the industry would be to fold OT and OM into OC and make a single stack, and hopefully include structured logging as well.

[lugg]

Why is that best for the industry?

Or more precisely, which, industry?

[manigandham]

Because tracing, metrics (and logs) are the 3 fundamentals of observability and having a single standard API and library would allow everyone to move on from implementing the same thing all these years.

There are 0 advantages offered by opentracing and openmetrics over opencensus to defend having separate projects.

[sciurus]

OpenTracing began in 2015. It was accepted as a CNCF project in 2016.

OpenCensus began in 2018.

Don't get me wrong, it's better for Google and Microsoft to collaborate on OpenCensus instead of continuing to develop separate client libraries for Stackdriver and Application Insights. It would be lovely if AWS joined too.

I just want to point out that there was a lot of community effort and vendor adoption around OpenTracing by 2018 that Google chose to ignore. If you want to reduce fragmentation and reimplementation, criticize that decision, not the existence of OpenTracing.

[manigandham]

Users don't care what came first. OpenCensus created a better model by combining tracing and metrics and building libraries.