Community Growth through Connections with Distributed Tracing Workgroup + OpenTracing

[Lewis John Mcgibbney <le...@gmail.com>]

Hi Folks,
Are there any ongoing or planned engagements/collaborations ongoing with
any of the above? I spoke with a couple of folks @ApacheCon last week and
they were keen to connect with dev@ on a face-to-face basis to see what was
going on.
Is/are anyone from HTrace involved in these activities? If not then is this
something that we want to engage in?
I'm just throwing this out here to see what is going on.
Thanks
Lewis

-- 
*Lewis*

Re: Community Growth through Connections with Distributed Tracing Workgroup + OpenTracing

[Colin McCabe <cm...@apache.org>]

There are a few folks around.  Here's a brief summary:

OpenTracing is a project which sits on top of other tracing projects,
and just provides an API.  It's kind of like Apache Gora, which provides
an API on top of multiple Key/Value stores.  Of course, this relies on
the different tracing projects having at least somewhat similar data
models.  Right now, the main backend for OpenTracing is Zipkin.  There
are also some folks interested in creating closed-source backends for
OpenTracing.

Both Zipkin and OpenTracing are open source.  However, they aren't
Apache.  I'm not sure what the governance model is-- that might be a
good thing to ask about.  I think they are handling everything through
GitHub for now.  They have been fairly responsive and reasonable in our
discussions, and generally seem like very nice folks.  Adrian Cole
(Zipkin) might be a good person to ask about OpenTracing.

It would be nice if we could cross-post some discussions between our
list and theirs.  However, I remember most of the discussion taking
place through Gitter, which might make that difficult.  I remember the
biggest point of contention being multiple parents-- there were some
folks who argued against the idea of allowing spans to have multiple
parents.  HTrace supports multi-parent, and Zipkin does not.  It would
be a good project for someone to write code to hook OpenTracing up to
HTrace.

There is also the Linux Foundation Diagnostic and Monitoring Workgroup. 
These guys are mostly interested in tracing things with extremely fine
granularity on single nodes.  There was a lot of discussion about things
like LTT (Linux Trace Toolkit), ftrace, tracing hooks inside the Linux
kernel, etc.  I gave a presentation at the Linux Tracing Summit in 2015.
 See http://tracingsummit.org/wiki/TracingSummit2015  We also talked
about things like _extremely_ low-level tracing using Intel's processor
hooks.  Mathieu Desnoyers might be a good person to ask about this
group.

I feel like fine-grained kernel-level tracing will stay separate from
higher-level tracing for some time yet.  It's pretty difficult to create
a system that hits both of those sweet spots at the same time.

best,
Colin


On Thu, May 19, 2016, at 10:11, Lewis John Mcgibbney wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> Are there any ongoing or planned engagements/collaborations ongoing with
> any of the above? I spoke with a couple of folks @ApacheCon last week and
> they were keen to connect with dev@ on a face-to-face basis to see what
> was
> going on.
> Is/are anyone from HTrace involved in these activities? If not then is
> this
> something that we want to engage in?
> I'm just throwing this out here to see what is going on.
> Thanks
> Lewis
> 
> -- 
> *Lewis*