OpenTracing vs OpenTelemetry?

[edeandrea]

What would be the team's recommendation on distributed tracing? OpenTracing or OpenTelemetry?

From reading the guides on both it seems OpenTracing is more mature but OpenTelemetry is where everything is going in the future? If I'm building something now and I want application, datasource, kafka traces, which one should I use now?

To me it seems right now that OpenTracing should be what I want to use.

[quarkus-bot[bot]]

/cc @Ladicek, @radcortez

[radcortez]

OpenTelemetry.

Yes, probably OpenTracing is more widely available and integrated, but we are closing the gap with OpenTelemetry.

The main reason to recommend OpenTelemetry is that OpenTracing (and OpenCensus) merged in OpenTelemetry and both communities moved there as well. Effectively OpenTracing is in maintenance mode and everyone is moving to use OpenTelemetry instead.

[famod]

This seems to be tracking that log enhancement: #18228
The most recent comments have been about replacing the MDC store with a non-thread-local one but it appears to me it would also work with a ThreadContextProvider as suggested here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65039035/manual-context-propagation-in-quarkus-native-mode/65040601#65040601 ?

[radcortez]

Hi @famod, right now, I mostly focus on the Tracing part, which still requires a lot of work, so no concrete plan for it at the moment. If someone would like to invest some cycles on it, it would be great :)

[kirankolli-addepar]

@radcortez OpenTelemetry support seems limited as of 2.16. A lot of the features like automatically adding spans to JDBC calls etc are only available on OpenTracing extensions. Add to this the fact that both the extensions do not work when added together i.e. they only work mutually exclusively. When will OpenTelemetry be actually usable in Quarkus ? Do we have a timeline ?

[edeandrea]

A lot of the features like automatically adding spans to JDBC calls etc are only available on OpenTracing extensions

I'm not sure what you mean? That's fully supported and works fine, both for JDBC and reactive data sources, and has for some time.

OpenTelemetry is fully integrated into the Quarkus Superheroes Sample app if you'd like to take a look.

I also wrote an article about it 6 months or so ago.

The Quarkus OpenTelemetry guide has all the details.

[radcortez]

For JDBC you need some extra configuration detailed here:
https://quarkus.io/guides/opentelemetry#jdbc

We could simplify it to match it with the configuration required by OpenTracing, but we prefer to keep it as close as possible to how OpenTelemetry does it. There is a PR coming that is going to expose all of the OTel configurations as is into Quarkus.

There is a lot of stuff we are working on right now, which you can follow here: Quarkus Roadmap/Planning (view). We are improving and adding more OTel support with every version. You can also check #17118 with all the integrations we have done so far.

If something is not working for you, please let us know, and we will have a look.