OpenTelemetry vs OpenTracing: Migration & Comparison

OpenTelemetry supersedes OpenTracing as the unified observability standard. OpenTracing (deprecated) focused solely on distributed tracing, while OpenTelemetry combines OpenTracing and OpenCensus to provide traces, metrics, and logs in a single framework. Organizations using OpenTracing should migrate to OpenTelemetry for broader observability capabilities and active development.

Why migrate to OpenTelemetry: OpenTracing development ceased when it merged into OpenTelemetry. Continuing with OpenTracing means missing critical updates, security patches, and modern observability features like metrics correlation and unified data collection.

What is OpenTelemetry?

OpenTelemetry is designed to provide a unified observability solution that works across different programming languages, frameworks, and environments. It allows developers to instrument their code using a common set of APIs and provides flexibility in the choice of telemetry backends.

OpenTelemetry encourages collaboration and community involvement, driving the evolution and improvement of observability practices in the industry.

OpenTelemetry aims to be vendor agnostic, allowing you to choose different telemetry backends and easily move between them. It promotes a standardized format for telemetry data, enabling compatibility and interoperability between different systems and tools.

What is OpenTracing?

OpenTracing is a deprecated open-source API specification for distributed tracing that provided vendor-neutral instrumentation for capturing trace data across microservices. Created in 2016 as a CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) project, OpenTracing offered language-specific APIs allowing developers to instrument applications without locking into specific tracing backends like Jaeger, Zipkin, or proprietary solutions.

Key Facts:

OpenTracing focused specifically on distributed tracing - tracking requests as they propagate through multiple services in a distributed system. The goal was capturing timing and causal relationships between components processing a request, enabling developers to identify performance bottlenecks and debug complex interactions across service boundaries.

Why OpenTracing was deprecated: OpenTracing addressed only one aspect of observability (traces) while lacking standards for metrics collection and log correlation. When Google's OpenCensus project emerged with similar goals but different approaches, the community recognized fragmentation issues and merged both projects into OpenTelemetry to provide a unified observability solution.

OpenTelemetry vs OpenTracing

OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing share a common ancestry. OpenTelemetry is the result of a 2019 merger between OpenTracing and OpenCensus, combining their strengths to provide a single, standardized solution for telemetry instrumentation and collection.

What is OpenCensus? OpenCensus was Google's open-source observability framework that emerged in 2018, providing both distributed tracing and metrics collection. While OpenTracing focused exclusively on tracing APIs, OpenCensus offered a more comprehensive approach by adding metrics instrumentation and built-in exporters for popular backends. This created ecosystem fragmentation - developers had to choose between OpenTracing's broader language support or OpenCensus's richer feature set.

Why the merger made sense:

The merger eliminated duplication of effort, ended the "choose one or the other" dilemma, and created critical mass for industry adoption. Major vendors (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Splunk, Datadog) united behind OpenTelemetry rather than maintaining separate integrations for two competing standards.

While OpenTracing focuses on distributed tracing, OpenTelemetry expands the scope to include metrics and logs. OpenTelemetry provides a unified and language-agnostic approach to instrumentation, making it a more comprehensive and versatile solution for observability in modern distributed systems.

Although OpenTelemetry has superseded OpenTracing in terms of its broader observability capabilities, OpenTracing's principles and specifications remain valuable and have influenced the development of OpenTelemetry.

OpenTracing Limitations

OpenTracing served its purpose as a distributed tracing standard but had fundamental limitations that led to its deprecation:

The lack of a standardized export protocol meant organizations using OpenTracing still faced vendor lock-in at the data collection layer. While OpenTracing APIs were vendor-neutral, integrating with specific backends like Jaeger, Zipkin, or commercial solutions required backend-specific instrumentation libraries. This defeated part of the vendor-neutrality goal. See OpenTelemetry backend for modern alternatives.

Is OpenTelemetry compatible with OpenTracing?

OpenTelemetry was designed with backward compatibility in mind to ensure a smooth transition for projects already using OpenTracing.

OpenTelemetry provides bridge components that allow you to interoperate between OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing instrumentation and libraries. These bridge components allow you to gradually migrate from OpenTracing to OpenTelemetry without disrupting your existing tracing setup.

While OpenTelemetry provides compatibility with OpenTracing, the preferred approach is to migrate to native OpenTelemetry instrumentations in the long term.

OpenTelemetry instrumentations offer more advanced features and access to the full observability capabilities provided by OpenTelemetry. However, the compatibility layer allows for a gradual transition, ensuring a smooth migration path for projects already utilizing OpenTracing.

OpenTracing shim

OpenTelemetry project includes OpenTelemetry Collector, which acts as a centralized agent for collecting, transforming, and exporting telemetry data. OpenTelemetry Collector includes a component called the OpenTracing Shim, which allows you to consume traces generated by OpenTracing instrumentation and export them as OpenTelemetry data.

By using OpenTelemetry Collector with the OpenTracing Shim, you can continue to use your existing OpenTracing instrumentation and seamlessly integrate it with the rest of the OpenTelemetry ecosystem to take advantage of the advanced capabilities provided by OpenTelemetry.

How to choose between OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing?

If you're thinking about choosing between OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing, it is recommended that you go for OpenTelemetry as OpenTracing is now deprecated. However, OpenTelemetry supports the use of both the OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing APIs in the same code base to ease migration.

OpenTelemetry provides a more comprehensive observability solution than OpenTracing. While OpenTracing focuses solely on distributed tracing, OpenTelemetry extends the scope to include metrics and logs. With OpenTelemetry, you can take a unified approach to collecting and analyzing metrics, traces, and logs to gain a more complete understanding of your system's behavior and performance.

But if you already have an existing application that uses OpenTracing, it may make sense to continue using OpenTracing in the short term. However, given the momentum and broader feature set of OpenTelemetry, it would be beneficial to plan to migrate to OpenTelemetry in the future to take advantage of its enhanced observability capabilities.

Conclusion

OpenTelemetry supersedes OpenTracing as the industry-standard observability framework. Choose OpenTelemetry for new projects to access traces, metrics, logs, and active development. For existing OpenTracing deployments, use the compatibility bridge for gradual migration while planning a full transition to native OpenTelemetry instrumentation.

Organizations should migrate from OpenTracing because it no longer receives updates, lacks modern observability features like metrics and log correlation, and has no standardized export protocol. OpenTelemetry provides these capabilities with vendor-neutral OTLP, auto-instrumentation, and unified APIs across 11+ programming languages.

Uptrace is an OpenTelemetry APM that provides distributed tracing, metrics visualization, and log correlation in a single platform. Get started with Uptrace for production-ready OpenTelemetry observability.

FAQ

What is OpenTracing? OpenTracing is a deprecated open-source API specification for distributed tracing created in 2016 as a CNCF project. It provided vendor-neutral instrumentation for capturing trace data across microservices in 9 programming languages but focused solely on traces without metrics or logs support.

What is OpenTelemetry? OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework that combines OpenTracing and OpenCensus into a unified standard for traces, metrics, and logs. It's a CNCF graduated project with 11+ language SDKs, auto-instrumentation, and the OTLP protocol for vendor-neutral telemetry export.

What is OpenCensus? OpenCensus was Google's open-source observability framework from 2018 that provided both distributed tracing and metrics collection. It merged with OpenTracing in 2019 to form OpenTelemetry, combining OpenTracing's broader language support with OpenCensus's richer feature set including metrics instrumentation.

Is OpenTracing deprecated? Yes, OpenTracing was officially deprecated in 2019 when it merged into OpenTelemetry. The project no longer receives active development, security patches, or new features. Organizations using OpenTracing should migrate to OpenTelemetry for continued support and modern observability capabilities.

OpenTelemetry vs OpenTracing: key differences? OpenTelemetry provides traces, metrics, and logs in a unified framework with OTLP export protocol and auto-instrumentation for 11+ languages. OpenTracing offered only trace APIs for 9 languages with no standardized export, requiring vendor-specific integration code for each backend.

Can I use OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing together? Yes, OpenTelemetry provides backward compatibility through bridge components and the OpenTracing Shim, allowing gradual migration. You can run both OpenTelemetry and OpenTracing APIs in the same codebase during transition periods without disrupting existing tracing infrastructure.

How do I migrate from OpenTracing to OpenTelemetry? Use the OpenTelemetry bridge/shim to maintain OpenTracing compatibility while gradually replacing instrumentation with native OpenTelemetry SDKs. Start with new services using OpenTelemetry, then migrate existing services incrementally to minimize risk and disruption to production monitoring.

What is the OpenTracing shim? The OpenTracing Shim is an OpenTelemetry Collector component that consumes traces generated by OpenTracing instrumentation and exports them as OpenTelemetry OTLP data. This allows existing OpenTracing applications to integrate with the OpenTelemetry ecosystem without immediate code changes.

OpenCensus vs OpenTelemetry? OpenCensus merged into OpenTelemetry and is no longer maintained separately. OpenTelemetry combines OpenCensus's metrics capabilities with OpenTracing's distributed tracing APIs, adding logs support and the OTLP protocol for standardized telemetry export across all signal types.

Which backends support OpenTracing? OpenTracing integrated with Jaeger, Zipkin, LightStep, Datadog, Uptrace, and other tracing systems through vendor-specific libraries. However, these integrations are deprecated in favor of OpenTelemetry's vendor-neutral OTLP protocol that works with any compliant backend.

Should I choose OpenTelemetry or OpenTracing? Always choose OpenTelemetry for new projects. OpenTracing is deprecated with no active development or security updates. OpenTelemetry provides broader observability (traces + metrics + logs), active CNCF support, auto-instrumentation, and standardized OTLP export that OpenTracing lacks.

What programming languages support OpenTelemetry? OpenTelemetry supports 11+ languages including Java, Python, Go, JavaScript/Node.js, .NET/C#, Ruby, PHP, Erlang/Elixir, C++, Rust, and Swift. Most languages offer both manual instrumentation SDKs and automatic instrumentation agents for popular frameworks.

Is OpenTelemetry backward compatible with OpenTracing? Yes, OpenTelemetry provides bridge components for gradual migration from OpenTracing. The OpenTracing Bridge allows OpenTelemetry tracers to work with existing OpenTracing instrumentation, and the Shim enables OpenTracing API calls to generate OpenTelemetry spans.

What is OTLP protocol? OTLP (OpenTelemetry Protocol) is the standardized protocol for exporting telemetry data (traces, metrics, logs) from instrumented applications to observability backends. Unlike OpenTracing which lacked export standards, OTLP provides vendor-neutral data transmission over gRPC or HTTP.

How does OpenTelemetry improve on OpenTracing? OpenTelemetry adds metrics and logs to OpenTracing's trace-only coverage, introduces the OTLP export protocol eliminating vendor-specific integrations, provides auto-instrumentation reducing manual code changes, and receives active CNCF development with regular updates and security patches.