Mastering Distributed Tracing

Bet on emerging standards

Whether you decide to deploy an open source tracing platform like Jaeger or Zipkin, use a commercial vendor, or even build your own, there are a few critical choices you need to make to future-proof your efforts. Instrumenting a code base is expensive and time-consuming, so you only want to do it once. Vendor-neutral standards like OpenTracing give you the flexibility of changing your mind later about which tracing backend you want to use. However, the OpenTracing API does not dictate how the trace context is represented on the wire, leaving this decision to the implementations, and ultimately to you, since many implementations are configurable. As an example, the Jaeger clients can use Jaeger's native trace context format ...