When first hearing of the OpenTracing project in 2016 there was excitement, finally an open standard for tracing. First, what is a trace? A trace is following a transaction from different services to build an end to end picture. The latency of each transaction segment is captured to determine which is slow, or causing performance issues. The trace may also include metadata such as metrics and logs, more on that later. Great, so if this is open this will solve all interoperability issues we have, and allow me to use multiple APM and tracing tools at once? It will help avoid vendor or project lock-in, unlock cloud services which are opaque or invisible? Nope! Why not? Today there are so many different implementations of tracing providing end to end transaction monitoring, and the reason why is that each project or vendor has different capabilities and use cases for the traces. Most tool users don't need to know the implementation details, but when manually instrumenting wi
Jonah Kowall is the VP of Market Development and Insights at AppDynamics, driving the company’s product roadmap and vision, entry into new markets and providing technology and business insights. Previously 15 years as a practitioner at several startups and larger enterprises focused on infrastructure and operations, security, and performance engineering. In 2011 Jonah changed careers, moving to Gartner to focus on availability and performance monitoring and IT operations management (ITOM).