I am looking into distribution tracing tools.
Found there two very popular.
What are key differences between them ? Which one would you recommend ? Will you recommend other open source distributed tracking tool ?
Getting a handle on the distributed tracing space can be a bit confusing. Here's a quick summary...
Open Source Tracers
There are a number of popular open source tracers, which is where Zipkin sits:
Commercial Tracers
There are also a lot of vendors offering commercial monitoring/observability tools which are either centred around or include distributed tracing:
Standardisation Efforts
Alongside all these products are numerous attempts at creating standards around distributed tracing. These typically start by creating a standard API for the trace-recording side of the architecture, and sometimes extend to become prescriptive about the content of traces or even the wire format. This is where OpenTracing fits in. So it is not a tracing solution itself, but an API that can be implemented by the trace recording SDKs of multiple tracers, allowing you to swap between vendors more easily. The most common standards are:
Note that the first two in the list have been abandoned, with their contributors joining forces to create the third one together.[1]
[1] https://opensource.googleblog.com/2019/05/opentelemetry-merger-of-opencensus-and.html
