Meme saying "I was trying to communicate without words, but it wasn't working"

Members of OpenTracing made a New Year’s Resolution in 2018 to communicate the progress made by the project regularly and consistently. To that end, this is the first of many posts to come. Read on to learn about what happened in and adjacent to OpenTracing in the month of January 2018.

OpenTracing project updates

DataDog, New Relic, Instana, and Skywalking Joined the OpenTracing Specification Council

The following people+projects have recently joined the OTSC:

To learn more about the OTSC and its responsibilities, please check out the project organization document.

Kicking off documentation and language maintainers projects

Ted Young is kicking off two working groups in OpenTracing:

Core API and official OpenTracing contributions

Java v0.31 launched

The latest version of the Java API has been released. This version replaces the experimental context propagation introduced in v0.30.

Though v0.31 “sounds” like a small change from v0.30, in pre-1.0 semver tradition there are major and consequential improvements in this release, and it involved months of cross-organization collaboration and testing.

Changelog

To allow both v0.30 and v0.31 context propagation to work together, a backwards-compatibility layer has been created. Learn more.

Java spring messaging

As part of OpenTracing’s growing support for Spring, Spring Messaging instrumentation has now been added. Please also check out the main Spring Cloud OpenTracing project.

Community Contributions

Spring cloud sleuth announced support for OpenTracing

Spring Cloud offers a simple and accessible programming model to the most common distributed system patterns, helping developers build resilient, reliable, and coordinated applications. Spring Cloud is built on top of Spring Boot, making it easy for developers to get started and become productive quickly. Sleuth is Spring Cloud’s distributed tracing system and they announced support for OpenTracing.

Zipkin implementation for OpenTracing tracer in PHP

Built by Typeform engineer, José Carlos Chávez, this library allows OpenTracing API consumers for PHP to use Zipkin as their tracing backend.

Content from the community:

OpenTracing in Flask tutorial

“You may have noticed that both OpenTracing and Jaeger’s tagline mention “distributed”. Besides providing a vendor-neutral instrumentation API, OpenTracing also provides a standard way to propagate trace context across microservices. This is crucial for debugging issues if your app is composed of microservices. I like to think of it as distributed backtraces…”

by Derek Haynes, Scout App

Where did my messages go? Tracing distributed systems with OpenTracing

“This presentation will show how to instrument your Java applications with OpenTracing to trace messages from web and mobile clients to your services and back to your data systems,by using several OpenTracing-compatible tools (Uber’s Jaeger and Zipkin) to visualize your message flows, transaction per transaction.”

by Jorge E. Q. Otoya

Distributed tracing workshop update

Tracing community leaders organized a Distributed Tracing Workshop last week in Seattle. Here’s a quick recap by an attendee, Ted Young.

Ways to engage

Community collaboration on CFPs

OpenTracing contributors, users, and enthusiasts from companies including ScoutApp, LightStep, Scytale, DataDog, and Prometheus collaborated on conference calls for papers in January. OpenTracing-related talks were submitted to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe, Monitorama, Velocity, and DockerCon.

If you have suggestions of conferences we should attend or would like to collaborate on a CFP, send a note to hello@opentracing.io.

OpenTracing at testing in production Meetup

Priyanka Sharma will be speaking about “Testing and Debugging in Production with Distributed Tracing” at the Testing in Production meetup on February 20, 2018 at Heavybit in San Francisco. Please stop by if you’re in the area.

Share your experience and feedback

We’d love to collaborate on any case studies showing OpenTracing usage in production environments. If you’re interested, send us a note at hello@opentracing.io!

Want to share an OpenTracing-related update in the newsletter? Email us at hello@opentracing.io. Also, this our first post and we’d love feedback, so don’t hesitate to drop us a line!