SYSTEM Cited by 2 sources

OpenTracing

OpenTracing is a vendor-neutral API specification for distributed tracing, originally developed as a CNCF project. It defines the core primitives — span, trace, span context, tags, logs, baggage, and semantic conventions — and a pluggable tracer interface so that application code can be instrumented once and routed to any backend (Jaeger, Zipkin, vendor APMs, etc.).

Status: merged into OpenTelemetry (2019)

OpenTracing was archived in 2019 when it and OpenCensus merged to form OpenTelemetry, which is now the de-facto distributed-tracing standard. Instrumentation written against OpenTracing still runs today via bridges / compatibility shims, but new instrumentation should target OpenTelemetry. The core primitives (span, span context, semantic conventions) carried over essentially unchanged.

What carries over

• Spans with parent-child relationships — the causal graph OpenTracing introduced is preserved by OpenTelemetry. This is what primitives like adaptive paging depend on to identify the "closest team to the problem" at alert time.
• Semantic conventions — standardised tag names (http.method, db.statement, etc.) moved to OpenTelemetry with minor renames; the interop story across OpenTracing- instrumented and OpenTelemetry-instrumented services is good.
• Context propagation formats — W3C Trace Context subsumed OpenTracing's propagators.

Zalando instantiation

companies/zalando rolled out OpenTracing platform-wide during Cyber Week preparations (Phase 2 of their SRE evolution), starting with tier-1 hot-path browse services and expanding to tier-2 the following year. They adopted traffic-source conventions tagging each request's originating class (App / Web / push notifications / load tests) — see concepts/traffic-source-tagging-in-traces — to support capacity planning. The causality data from traces plus OpenTracing semantic conventions is the substrate for their adaptive paging alert handler (Source: sources/2020-10-07-zalando-how-zalando-prepares-for-cyber-week).

Seen in

• sources/2020-10-07-zalando-how-zalando-prepares-for-cyber-week — Zalando's fleet-wide OpenTracing rollout, tier-gated expansion, traffic-source tagging, adaptive-paging application.
• sources/2021-06-30-zalando-how-we-use-kotlin-for-backend-services — Zalando Kotlin Guild names opentracing-toolbox as the default tracing library for new Kotlin backend services on Spring Boot; ships a dedicated opentracing-kotlin submodule. Confirms OpenTracing is still the live instrumentation standard at Zalando in 2021 despite the 2019 OpenTelemetry merger.

Related

• systems/opentelemetry — successor standard; target for new instrumentation.
• systems/opentracing-toolbox — Zalando's integration library with Spring Boot + Kotlin submodules.
• concepts/observability
• concepts/adaptive-paging
• concepts/traffic-source-tagging-in-traces