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monitoringzipkinopentracingdistributed-tracing
Traycho Ivanov
Traycho Ivanov

Reputation: 3217

What are keys differences between OpenTracing and Zipkin?

I am looking into distribution tracing tools.

Found there two very popular.

What are key differences between them ? Which one would you recommend ? Will you recommend other open source distributed tracking tool ?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2338

Answers (1)

Graham Lea
Graham Lea

Reputation: 6333

Getting a handle on the distributed tracing space can be a bit confusing. Here's a quick summary...

Open Source Tracers

There are a number of popular open source tracers, which is where Zipkin sits:

  • Zipkin
  • Jaeger
  • Haystack

Commercial Tracers

There are also a lot of vendors offering commercial monitoring/observability tools which are either centred around or include distributed tracing:

  • Appdynamics
  • AWS X-Ray
  • Azure Application Insights
  • Datadog
  • Dynatrace
  • Google Cloud Trace
  • Honeycomb
  • Lightstep
  • New Relic
  • SignalFX
  • (probably 100 more...)

Standardisation Efforts

Alongside all these products are numerous attempts at creating standards around distributed tracing. These typically start by creating a standard API for the trace-recording side of the architecture, and sometimes extend to become prescriptive about the content of traces or even the wire format. This is where OpenTracing fits in. So it is not a tracing solution itself, but an API that can be implemented by the trace recording SDKs of multiple tracers, allowing you to swap between vendors more easily. The most common standards are:

  • OpenTracing
  • OpenCensus
  • OpenTelemetry

Note that the first two in the list have been abandoned, with their contributors joining forces to create the third one together.[1]

[1] https://opensource.googleblog.com/2019/05/opentelemetry-merger-of-opencensus-and.html

Upvotes: 11

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