CODEWITHSUNDEEP
opentracing
Yuri Shkuro
Yuri Shkuro

Reputation: 784

Does OpenTracing specify any on-wire protocol/format?

In issue comment msample asked:

We are looking at using OpenTracing and my searching for the on-wire/protocol for SpanContext led me here. I was surprised to not find this part solidly defined as it seems critical to the broad adoption of OpenTracing.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 494

Answers (1)

Yuri Shkuro
Yuri Shkuro

Reputation: 784

OpenTracing does not specify on-wire formats, neither for in-band messages like the span context passed via RPC messages, nor for the out of band messages like those used to send tracing spans out of application to the tracing backend. The reason for this is that such standardization is not necessary as long as the target architecture is using the OpenTracing libraries from the same tracing system (like Jaeger). OpenTracing API is first of all an instrumentation API for distributed systems. The wire formats are the implementation details of tracing systems implementing the API.

The wire format specification like https://github.com/TraceContext/tracecontext-spec is useful if one wants to pass trace info between services that are using different tracing backends, e.g. requests starting with services instrumented by Jaeger and then going onto services using StackDriver. But such integration has a whole set of different issues that need to be resolved, such as the sampling approach. There was no reason why OpenTracing API should be blocked by these separate standards.

Upvotes: 2

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