zipkin VS opentelemetry-specification

When choosing distributed tracing tools, considerations include your technology stack, business requirements, and monitoring complexity. Zipkin, SkyWalking, and OpenTelemetry are popular distributed tracing solutions, each with its unique features.

From the perspective of the realization of GraphQL infrastructure, the interesting direction is "Finding". How to find the problem? How to find the bottleneck of the system? Distributed Tracing System (DTS) will help answer this question. Distributed tracing is a method of observing requests as they propagate through distributed environments. In our scenario, we have dozens of subgraphs, gateway, and transport layer through which the request goes. We have several tools that can be used to detect the whole lifecycle of the request through the system, e.g. Jaeger, Zipkin or solutions that provided DTS as a part of the solution NewRelic.

Zipkin is a distributed tracing system used for tracking and analyzing how requests move through complex systems, especially in setups with many interconnected services, known as microservices.

Distributed Tracing: Middleware for distributed tracing like Jaeger and Zipkin helps monitor and trace requests as they flow through multiple microservices, aiding in debugging, performance optimization, and understanding the system's behavior.

For microservice tracing, you might want to look at Zipkin [0], or OpenTelemetry [1]

[0] https://zipkin.io/

I’ve not used a self-hosted solution before, but here’s one I found. https://zipkin.io/

> IMO the reason these vendors can and do charge so much is not because telemetry software is hard.

I always saw it as "they are charging for their polished UI/experience"

The UI of https://zipkin.io/ versus DataDog is kind of... not really in the same ballpark?

There are the zipkin https://zipkin.io/ and jaeger https://www.jaegertracing.io/ packages/components you can use both have quickstarts if you consider that to be a beginner's guide.

Zipkin, which was developed by Twitter, is an open source tool for distributed tracing that can also be used to troubleshoot latency issues in your application. While Zipkin is Java-based, py_zipkin is an implementation for Python.

It means that the OpenTelemetry project provides not only a specification to define the contract between the applications, collectors, and telemetry databases, but also a set of APIs, SDKs, and tools like instrumentation libraries (for different languages), collectors, operators, etc. OpenTelemetry is open-source and vendor-agnostic, so the project is not tied to any specific vendor or cloud provider.

Sure, happy to provide more specifics!

Our main issue was the lack of a synchronous gauge. The officially supported asynchronous API of registering a callback function to report a gauge metric is very different from how we were doing things before, and would have required lots of refactoring of our code. Instead, we wrote a wrapper that exposes a synchronous-like API: https://gist.github.com/yolken-airplane/027867b753840f7d15d6....

It seems like this is a common feature request across many of the SDKs, and it's in the process of being fixed in some of them (https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specificatio...)? I'm not sure what the plans are for the golang SDK specifically.

Another, more minor issue, is the lack of support for "constant" attributes that are applied to all metrics. We use these to identify the app, among other use cases, so we added wrappers around the various "Add", "Record", "Observe", etc. calls that automatically add these. (It's totally possible that this is supported and I missed it, in which case please let me know!).

Overall, the SDK was generally well-written and well-documented, we just needed some extra work to make the interfaces more similar to the ones were were using before.

OpenTelemetry is an open-source collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs that aims to standardize the way we generate and collect telemetry data. It follows a specification-driven development. The OpenTelemetry specification  has design and implementation guidelines for how the instrumentation libraries should be implemented. In addition, it provides client libraries in all the major programming languages that follow the specification.

Two problems with OpenTelemetry:

1. It doesn't know what the hell it is. Is it a semantic standard? Is a protocol? It is a facade? What layer of abstraction does it provide? Answer: All of the above! All the things! All the layers!

2. No one from OpenTelemetry has actually tried instrumenting a library. And if they have, they haven't the first suggestion on how instrumenters should actually use metrics, traces, and logs. Do you write to all three? To one? I asked this question two years ago, not a single response. [1]

[1] https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specificatio...

OpenTelemetry Specification GitHub

One update to this: we proposed replacing the count suffix in OpenTelemetry with total to match Prometheus/OpenMetrics. That discussion resulted in the count suffix being removed from the OpenTelemetry semantic conventions. We'll soon update our metric from being called function.calls.count to just function.calls and the generated Prometheus queries will refer to function_calls_total. That resolves one of the main conflicts between the two specs.

This is your best bet if you want to track status updates: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/issues/2911

OpenTelemetry is a standard for implementing telemetry in your applications. It provides a specification, containing the requirements that all implementations should follow as well as some implementations for major languages, including an API and a SDK to interact with it.

At this point, we are about to do the real work where we have to configure OpenTelemetry and export telemetry data to New Relic. Exporting this kind of data relies on a specific protocol; the OpenTelemetry Protocol or OTLP.

OpenTelemetry provides instrumentation libraries for your application. The development of these libraries is guided by the OpenTelemetry specification. The OpenTelemetry specification describes the cross-language requirements and design expectations for all OpenTelemetry implementations in various programming languages.