
W3C Distributed Tracing Working Group - jbaviat
https://www.w3.org/2018/distributed-tracing/
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tylerchr
I have been watching this group since its inception, waiting for something
that I can treat as a standard.

They’re trying—and I am rooting for them—but from the outside it seems
piecemeal and scattered, like a side project that is nobody’s real priority.
Meanwhile, other initiatives have so much movement as to be unfollowable:
Zipkin! No, Jaeger! No, OpenTracing! No, OpenCensus! No, OpenTelemetry!

I am beginning to doubt that we will ever have a standard for distributed
tracing.

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tedsuo
Thanks for rooting! I’m sorry it looks confusing. It took several iterations
for the humans to converge on a single project, and achieve something like
consensus about what we wanted. But it feels like we are there - there’s ~100
working on it now, and I don’t see any remaining blockers.

From the inside, it’s felt like steadily rolling up a larger and larger
katamari ball, if you remember that game.

~~~
tylerchr
That’s really reassuring to hear! Keep up the hard work, and I’ll keep an eye
out for something in March or so.

Until then, where is the best place to look for updates?

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mentat
Isobel is writing weekly summaries as "OTel Me More" with the latest here:
[https://lightstep.com/blog/otel-me-more-opentelemetry-
projec...](https://lightstep.com/blog/otel-me-more-opentelemetry-project-news-
vol-7/)

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caniszczyk
Check out [https://opentelemetry.io](https://opentelemetry.io)

~~~
couchand
I don't know if the Get Started section is supposed to have links, but I want
to click on some of those subjects but don't have the patience to look
elsewhere for the content.

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tedsuo
Btw, if you are interested in distributed tracing, including the W3C and
opentelemetry, we blog a weekly roundup about it here:
[https://lightstep.com/blog/category/distributed-
tracing/](https://lightstep.com/blog/category/distributed-tracing/)

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mmclean
FYI for all, the W3C TraceContext specification will become a Proposed
Recommendation later this week. I'm one of the co-chairs of the group and am
happy to answer questions about our W3C work or OpenTelemetry.

~~~
Lx1oG-AWb6h_ZG0
Just curious, what was the rationale for randomizing the spanId at each hop?
(As opposed to a more structured format that could let you track the request
tree without relying on another field like timestamp)

~~~
mmclean
Existing tracing systems (Dapper, Zipkin, Dynatrace, Stackdriver, etc.)
already randomize with each hop, and there was a desire to be consistent with
the models that they already used. It's also more straightforward to
implement.

There's a discussion about "correlation context" inside of this W3C group
called , which maps to what you're describing. It'd be worth reaching out to
Sergey (one of the other co-chairs) if you want to find out more.

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threeseed
Disappointing to see that Amazon is absent from this group.

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sciurus
How does this relate to OpenTelemetry?

~~~
mmclean
W3C Trace Context defines an HTTP header format for traced requests, and
OpenTelemetry implements this format by default. While this project is
technically distinct from OpenTelemetry, it's effectively composed of the same
people (including me).

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toomim
Here's the group's charter: [https://www.w3.org/2018/04/distributed-tracing-
wg-charter.ht...](https://www.w3.org/2018/04/distributed-tracing-wg-
charter.html)

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equalunique
Does this mean I should throw out my OpenTracing book (which I haven't started
reading yet)?

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tedsuo
Actually, OpenTelemetry is compatible with OpenTracing, so the boom is still
relevant. The distributed tracing APIs are very similar, but OpenTelemtry also
includes metrics.

~~~
equalunique
Thank you.

