
OpenMetrics project accepted into CNCF Sandbox - ngaut
https://opensource.googleblog.com/2018/08/openmetrics-project-accepted-into-cncf.html
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cube2222
Can someone explain to me, what the pros/cons of this are as opposed to
OpenTracing?

~~~
nevi-me
EDIT: Tracing deals with annotating methods, and how long they take. E.g.
function a took 3 seconds, and make 2 DB calls that took 1.4 seconds. Metrics
deal with how many times you made calls, how long they took, etc. So two
importantly related parts of application monitoring.

Metrics is different to Tracing in this case. From the surface (or from
someone who doesn't closely follow), OpenCensus contains metrics and tracing
(and maybe more).

OpenMetrics appears to be the standardising the metrics part, hence the
sentence that OpenMetrics is being integrated with OpenCensus.

Now, you might ask, because I've also asked: what are the pros/cons of Census
over Tracing for tracing purposes?

It does look like both standards compete and perhaps diverge. I once sensed a
bit of bashing of the latter in the OpenCensus Gitter channel; which convinced
me to just stay with OpenTracing as they already had more integrations at the
time.

At least Metrics is being promoted by the same interests as those working on
Census, so we won't see another set of standards targeting the same
applications (LightStep, StackDriver, etc).

In short, why can't OC and OT combine their efforts?

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cube2222
Well, actually that's what I'm mainly interested in - what the technical
differences between OpenTracing and the tracing part of OpenCensus are.

Excuse me for my badly worded question.

However, why they can't combine their efforts:

Probably a lot of infrastructure is built on both of them, having the
aforementioned potential technical differences, which could make any
unification backwards incompatible, as in: traces produced by the unified
standard wouldn't be parsable by todays infrastructure tooling of the
companies using them.

There may also be different tradeoffs chosen, which again boils down to the
question regarding the technical differences.

~~~
nevi-me
The thing is that they both target similar applications. Zipkin has been
around for years, and as both support sending data to it, surely there's
enough common ground. I understand what you mean regarding infra, but I think
the parties could work towards unity in future.

gRPC supports OpenCensus for example, I recall that OpenTracing has been
working on an RPC for reporting traces. gRPC by being the RPC framework, it
would make sense if it could self-report to OT in addition to OC.

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polskibus
The blog post mentions that OpenCensus supports .NET, but on
[https://opencensus.io/language-support/](https://opencensus.io/language-
support/) .NET is not mentioned. What is true? Has anyone used opencensus with
.NET ?

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akerro
Google accepted spam comment on their blog :D

[https://opensource.googleblog.com/2018/08/openmetrics-
projec...](https://opensource.googleblog.com/2018/08/openmetrics-project-
accepted-into-cncf.html)

