官网链接：https://opentelemetry.io/about/
OpenTelemetry is the next major version of the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects
The leadership of OpenCensus and OpenTracing have come together to create OpenTelemetry, and it will supersede both projects. You can read more in this post about the OpenTelemetry roadmap.
OpenTelemetry is an open source observability framework. It is a CNCF Sandbox member, formed through a merger of the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects. The goal of OpenTelemetry is to provide a general-purpose API, SDK, and related tools required for the instrumentation of cloud-native software, frameworks, and libraries.
What is Observability?
The term observability stems from the discipline of control theory and refers to how well a system can be understood on the basis of the telemetry that it produces.
In software, observability typically refers to telemetry produced by services and is divided into three major verticals:
- Tracing, aka distributed tracing, provides insight into the full lifecycles, aka traces, of requests to the system, allowing you to pinpoint failures and performance issues.
- Metrics provide quantitative information about processes running inside the system, including counters, gauges, and histograms.
- Logging provides insight into application-specific messages emitted by processes.
OpenTelemetry is an effort to combine all three verticals into a single set of system components and language-specific telemetry libraries. It is meant to replace both the OpenTracing project, which focused exclusively on tracing, and the OpenCensus project, which focused on tracing and metrics.
OpenTelemetry will not initially support logging, though we aim to incorporate this over time.
Where can I read the OpenTelemetry specification?
The spec is available in the open-telemetry/specification repo on GitHub.
Observability, Outputs, and High-Quality Telemetry
Observability is a fashionable word with some admirably nerdy and academic origins. In control theory, “observability” measures how well we can understand the internals of a given system using only its external outputs. If you’ve ever deployed or operated a modern, microservice-based software application, you have no doubt struggled to understand its performance and behavior, and that’s because those “outputs” are usually meager at best. We can’t understand a complex system if it’s a black box. And the only way to light up those black boxes is with high-quality telemetry: distributed traces, metrics, logs, and more.
So how can we get our hands – and our tools – on precise, low-overhead telemetry from the entirety of a modern software stack? One way would be to carefully instrument every microservice, piece by piece, and layer by layer. This would literally work, it’s also a complete non-starter – we’d spend as much time on the measurement as we would on the software itself! We need telemetry as a built-in feature of our services.
The OpenTelemetry project is designed to make this vision a reality for our industry, but before we describe it in more detail, we should first cover the history and context around OpenTracing and OpenCensus.
OpenTracing and OpenCensus
In practice, there are several flavors (or “verticals” in the diagram) of telemetry data, and then several integration points (or “layers” in the diagram) available for each. Broadly, the cloud-native telemetry landscape is dominated by distributed traces, timeseries metrics, and logs; and end-users typically integrate with a thin instrumentation API or via straightforward structured data formats that describe those traces, metrics, or logs.
For several years now, there has been a well-recognized need for industry-wide collaboration in order to amortize the shared cost of software instrumentation. OpenTracing and OpenCensus have led the way in that effort, and while each project made different architectural choices, the biggest problem with either project has been the fact that there were two of them. And, further, that the two projects weren’t working together and striving for mutual compatibility.
In many ways, it’s most accurate to think of OpenTelemetry as the next major version of both OpenTracing and OpenCensus. Like any version upgrade, we will try to make it easy for both new and existing end-users, but we recognize that the main benefit to the ecosystem is the consolidation itself – not some specific and shiny new feature – and we are prioritizing our own efforts accordingly.
This model still works with the emergence of OpenTelemetry, which is aimed at the instrumentation space. The end users will be able to instrument their applications or frameworks with OpenTelemetry SDK and use Jaeger as the backend for tracing data.
Then there is the question about the future of Jaeger tracers (client libraries), which do occupy the same problem space as OpenTelemetry. In the short term, Jaeger client libraries can be changed to implement the OpenTelemetry API. This may be necessary in order to support new style of instrumentation while keeping the existing functionality that is specific to Jaeger (such as adaptive sampling).
In the long term, we will seriously consider freezing development of Jaeger client libraries and porting their unique features to OpenTelemetry default implementations, either upstream or as plugins. Developing and maintaining client libraries in multiple languages is a significant investment of project resources, which would be better spent on building new backend features.
What about OpenCensus Agent/Collector?
The “battery included” approach did not always work well even for OpenCensus libraries, because they still needed to be configured with specific exporter plugin in order to send data to concrete tracing backends, like Jaeger or Zipkin. To address that issue, the OpenCensus project started development of two backend components called agent and collector, playing nearly identical roles to Jaeger’s agent and collector:
- agent is a sidecar / host agent that receives telemetry from the client library in a standardized format and forwards it to collector;
- collector translates the data into the format understood by a specific tracing backend and sends it there. OpenCensus Collector is also able to perform tail-based sampling.
These two components have a much larger overlap with the functionality of the respective Jaeger backend components. However, they are still limited to the problem space of data gathering, rather than trace storage or post-processing. It means that in the future we might also strongly consider deprecating Jaeger agent and collector components and instead deploying the respective OpenTelemetry components. The main open question is whether OpenTelemetry components will be able to support additional features provided by the Jaeger components, such as adaptive sampling.
Conclusion
As I stated at the beginning, the OpenTelemetry project is a good news for the Jaeger project, as they are very much complementary in terms of problem domains each is trying to address. In the areas where there is an overlap, namely client libraries, agent & collector, we are planning to collaborate with OpenTelemetry and ideally deprecate the respective Jaeger components so that we don’t have to waste time maintaining redundant software.
If you are interested in working on observability and reliability challenges at Uber, including our open source tracing platform Jaeger, we are hiring.
References
- OpenTracing and OpenCensus are merging (OpenTracing blog)
- A Brief History of OpenTelemetry (So Far) (CNCF blog)
- OpenTelemetry: Panel Discussion and Q&A (KubeCon EU video)
- OpenTelemetry: Backwards Compatibility with OpenTracing and OpenCensus (KubeCon EU video)