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What is OpenTracing?

What is OpenTracing?

OpenTracing became a CNCF project back in 2016, with the goal of providing a vendor-agnostic specification for distributed tracing, offering developers the ability to trace a request from start to finish by instrumenting their code.

What happened to OpenTracing and OpenCensus?

OpenTracing and OpenCensus were two competing tracing frameworks, which led to the informal reference “the Tracing Wars.” Usually, competition is a good thing for end-users since it breeds innovation. However, in the open-source specification world, competition can lead to poor adoption, contribution, and support. To avoid this, it was announced at KubeCon 2019 in Barcelona that the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects would converge into one project called OpenTelemetry and join the CNCF.

The first beta version was then released in March 2020, and it continues to be the second most active CNCF project after Kubernetes.