[tylerchr]

I have been watching this group since its inception, waiting for something that I can treat as a standard.

They’re trying—and I am rooting for them—but from the outside it seems piecemeal and scattered, like a side project that is nobody’s real priority. Meanwhile, other initiatives have so much movement as to be unfollowable: Zipkin! No, Jaeger! No, OpenTracing! No, OpenCensus! No, OpenTelemetry!

I am beginning to doubt that we will ever have a standard for distributed tracing.

[couchand]

FWIW the OpenCensus website says: OpenCensus and OpenTracing have merged to form OpenTelemetry, which serves as the next major version of OpenCensus and OpenTracing. You'd never know it if you just looked at the other two websites, though...

And Jaeger has always been on top of OpenTracing. So I guess there's more unity than it seems.

[tedsuo]

Yeah, it’s all getting stitched together. I would expect v1.0 of OpenTelemetry coming in March, with W3C Trace-Context headers as the default format for context propagation.

[tedsuo]

Thanks for rooting! I’m sorry it looks confusing. It took several iterations for the humans to converge on a single project, and achieve something like consensus about what we wanted. But it feels like we are there - there’s ~100 working on it now, and I don’t see any remaining blockers.

From the inside, it’s felt like steadily rolling up a larger and larger katamari ball, if you remember that game.

[wikibob]

I think it’s incredibly important that a top priority be to put a very clear banner on the OpenCensus and OpenTracing pages explaining that they are becoming OpenTelemetry.

[tylerchr]

That’s really reassuring to hear! Keep up the hard work, and I’ll keep an eye out for something in March or so.

Until then, where is the best place to look for updates?

[mentat]

Isobel is writing weekly summaries as "OTel Me More" with the latest here: https://lightstep.com/blog/otel-me-more-opentelemetry-projec...