OpenCensus vs. OpenTracing

[Benjamin Krämer]

I looked a bit into tracing with gRPC lately and I often read about the plans to have OpenCensus directly integrated. It looks that it's already implemented in some platforms (java?). On the other side, there are some platforms in grpc-ecosystem that implement OpenTracing. So as far as I understood it, OpenCensus is tracing + stats while OpenTracing is just tracing.

Can anyone explain what the concrete plans are for OpenCensus and OpenTracing support? From my point of view, it looks like OpenCensus is the main goal and that OpenTracing is just supported for people that like to use it.

[d...@google.com]

Hi Benjamin,

I am the tech lead for the OpenCensus Java work. As you mention, OpenCensus provides both tracing and stats and is a separate project from OpenTracing. We have worked in conjunction with the gRPC team to use OpenCensus to instrument their code and it is integrated in at this point (has been for a while).

I don't know of any plans for gRPC to provide integrated OpenTracing support but someone from the gRPC team would need to say definitively.

[Benjamin Krämer]

Hi Dino,

thanks for your reply. I'm specifically looking into C++ and C# and couldn't find neither OpenCensus nor OpenTracing. I can see that both have C++ implementations ready but I can't find any code in the gRPC repository (of C++ or C#) on how to connect it. I know that Java has it working and also about the demo implementation over at https://github.com/rakyll/opencensus-grpc-demo

[Dino Oliva]

We are actively working on adding more documentation - general and language-specific - to opencensus.io along with examples. There should be more information available towards the end of the week (and incrementally from that point on). I have asked the OpenCensus C++ tech lead to follow-up here as well.

I am not certain of the status of the C# work but I'll look into it.

Regards,

--Dino

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[Dino Oliva]

I looked into the status of C# support - we have an informal agreement/understanding that Microsoft will work on it but we don't have a formal commitment on resources or dates confirmed.

[Adrian Cole]

I don't think many people are using opentracing's grpc instrumentation in java.

There were 21 unique IPs downloading it last month, from the only
version that generated stats (0.1.0). I don't have access to census
stats (no pun intended), but to put this in perspective, zipkin's grpc
instrumentation has 412 unique ips downloading from maven central.
Other language mileage may vary.

Point being that I don't think there's many impacted by whatever's out
there right now, that or they are very good at proxying downloads.

-A

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[Benjamin Krämer]

Thanks for the information. I think once OpenCensus is officially in GRPC c-core, the C# users (and other c-core implementations) can just rely on that implementation using OpenCensus C++ in the background.