Lutando Ngqakaza Lutando

I've had many people ask me questions about OpenTracing, often in relation to OpenZipkin. I've seen assertions about how it is vendor neutral and is the lock-in cure. This post is not a sanctioned, polished or otherwise muted view, rather what I personally think about what it is and is not, and what it helps and does not help with. Scroll to the very end if this is too long. Feel free to add a comment if I made any factual mistakes or you just want to add a comment.

So, what is OpenTracing?

OpenTracing is documentation and library interfaces for distributed tracing instrumentation. To be "OpenTracing" requires bundling its interfaces in your work, so that others can use it to time distributed operations with the same library.

So, who is it for?

OpenTracing interfaces are targeted to authors of instrumentation libraries, and those who want to collaborate with traces created by them. Ex something started a trace somewhere and I add a notable event to that trace. Structure logging was recently added to O

This assessment is performed with respect to the requirements of the .NET community open source projects which I maintain. It is restricted to the free tier provided by each system.

Only the drawbacks are listed, which makes the assessment sound a bit negative, but it's relative to a baseline functional expectation:

Linux and Windows
Fast provisioning
Concurrent builds
Common build properties surfaced as env vars (e.g build number)
Readable, copyable, and line-linkable log output, supporting ANSI colour codes and code page 437

	using System;

	namespace Akka.Testing
	{
	public interface IMyMessage { }
	public sealed class MessageA : IMyMessage { }
	public sealed class MessageB : IMyMessage { }

	public class MyActor : Actor<IMyMessage>
	{

	<Query Kind="Program">
	<NuGetReference>MedallionShell</NuGetReference>
	<Namespace>System.Threading.Tasks</Namespace>
	<Namespace>Medallion.Shell</Namespace>
	<Namespace>Medallion.Shell.Streams</Namespace>
	</Query>

	DumpContainer dc;
	async Task Main()
	{ var input = @"D:\Temp\fieldtest.mxf".Dump("input file");

	using Akka.Actor;
	using Akka.TestKit;
	using Akka.TestKit.NUnit;
	using NUnit.Framework;
	using System;
	using System.Linq;

	namespace akkaSchedulerTest.Test
	{
	public class RepeatedScheduleTest_Standard_Scheduler : TestKit