March 2018: OpenTracing Project Monthly Newsletter
Apologies for the delay in the March newsletter. We are days late but not dollars short. The theme that popped out to me for this month is just how many amazing companies are building offerings on top of OpenTracing. Check out the community contributions to learn more about HayStack from Expedia, AppOptics from Solar Winds, OpenTracing adapters for HoneyComb, and more. People are also sharing more and more about their OpenTracing usage, as we saw with the end user meetup in Austin. HomeAway’s presentation is available below.
Looking ahead, I’m excited to let you know that April is going to be the month of the EMEA Roadshow for OpenTracing. We’ll be in Berlin, Paris, and of course at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Copenhagen. Read on to see when and where to catch us!
OpenTracing Project Updates
Core API and Official OpenTracing Contributions
OpenTracing Ruby API v4.0
The new ruby API is out! This release adds the ScopeManager proposal to ruby, which allows the tracer to track which span is currently active. The changelog can be found here.
OpenTracing <> Neo4j
OpenTracing instrumentation for Neo4j Driver is available here.
OpenTracing <> Memcached
OpenTracing Java Memcached Client Instrumentation is available here.
Community Contributions
Instrumentation
Gqlgen by Adam Scarr of 99 Designs
This is a library for quickly creating strictly typed graphql servers in golang and has middleware instrumented with OpenTracing.
Janus — An API Gateway Written in Go with OpenTracing Support by HelloFresh
The folks at HelloFresh built an API Gateway and added OpenTracing support to enable distributed tracing across all endpoints. Check out Janus.
Opentracing-pyzipkin by Greg Haynes
Because py_zipkin is a zipkin client with Python 3 support which closely resembles the OpenTracing API, we have created an adapter with minimal effort between opentracing-python and py_zipkin.
Opentracing-javascript-utils by Zalando
Utilities to instrument web applications with OpenTracing are available here.
Tracing Systems
Experimental JavaScript Tracer (WIP) by DataDog
DataDog has released a work-in-progress Javascript tracer that people are welcome to collaborate on. Because of the nascent nature of it, please read the CONTRIBUTE.md before working on it.
Haystack Bindings for OpenTracing API
Expedia has built a tracing system called Haystack which is OpenTracing-native. Clients use this library to send trace data to a Haystack server.
AppOptics APM Instrumentation for Go by Solar Winds
AppOptics is SaaS-based monitoring with distributed tracing, code-level application performance monitoring, and host and infrastructure monitoring. This repository provides instrumentation for Go, which allows Go-based applications to be monitored using AppOptics.
Honeycomb-opentracing-go by HoneyComb
This repository contains helpers to send OpenTracing data to Honeycomb from Go services.
Content from the Community
OpenTracing Adoption at HomeAway by Eduardo Solis
Eduardo Solis of HomeAway presented his company’s use of the OpenTracing API at the end user meetup in Austin. Check out his presentation here. Videos to come shortly.
JavaLand 2018 — Finding Performance Bottlenecks with Distributed Tracing by Juraci Paixão Kröhling
Microservices are now the standard for new architectures. Their distributed nature makes it harder to determine the causes of a performance bottleneck, as one can’t just watch a single process and see the big picture. In this talk, you’ll learn how to instrument a business application (Spring Boot, Vert.x, Wildfly Swarm) with the OpenTracing API and use a tracing backend solution like Jaeger and/or a metrics solution like Prometheus to find, fix, and measure performance improvements to our distributed application.
The Difference Between Tracing, Tracing, and Tracing by Erika Arnold
An article by Erika Arnold of New Relic about the definitions and misconceptions fraught in the world of distributed tracing. A must read!
What is Tracing? By Ted Young
Ted Young expanded upon the various elements of tracing at the Austin end user meetup. Check out his slides to understand the mental model he applies.
Ways to Engage
As we mentioned at the beginning of this post, there are many opportunities to learn or help others learn about distributed tracing and observability. Below are some of the upcoming events. Please reach out if you can attend and/or want to be more involved.
April 25 — OpenTracing Meetup at Zalando in Berlin
Join Zalando as they welcome the core maintainers of OpenTracing to Berlin! You’ll learn about Zalando’s observability journey — both their challenges and successes. You’ll also hear directly from the lead maintainer for OpenTracing, Ted Young, about how you can use OpenTracing to get visibility into your systems at scale. RSVP here.
April 26 — OpenTracing Meetup at Criteo in Paris
Join Criteo as they welcome to Paris the core maintainers of OpenTracing and Ihor Dvoretskyi who is a Developer Advocate and Product Manager for Kubernetes. You’ll hear about how MySocialApp has successfully automated SSL on top of Kubernetes with distributed Traefik — both their challenges and successes. Also, learn from Ted Young how to use OpenTracing to get visibility into your systems at scale. RSVP here.
May 2–4 — KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in Copenhagen
Here are the OpenTracing sessions to watch. Don’t miss out:
- Wednesday, May 2 • 11:10–11:45: A Survey of the OSS Tracing Ecosystem — Ben Sigelman & Ted Young, LightStep (Beginner Skill Level)
- Wednesday, May 2 • 14:00–14:35: OpenTracing Project Intro — Priyanka Sharma & Ted Young, LightStep (Any Skill Level)
- Thursday, May 3 • 16:35–17:10: Observability and the Depths of Debugging Cloud-Native Applications using Linkerd and Conduit — Franziska von der Goltz, Buoyant, Inc (Intermediate Skill Level)
- Friday, May 4 • 11:10–11:45: Beyond OpenTracing — Allison Richardet, Asteris, LLC (Intermediate Skill Level)
- Friday, May 4 • 14:00–14:35: OpenTracing Project Deep Dive — Priyanka Sharma & Ted Young, LightStep (Intermediate Skill Level)
And that’s all for this month. Want to share an OpenTracing-related update in the newsletter? Email us at hello@opentracing.io. We’d also love feedback as always, so don’t hesitate to drop us a line!
