Recently, OpenTelemetry has been announced as a new CNCF sandbox project resulting from a merger of OpenTracing and OpenCensus [1], [2], [3], [4]. Several people have already asked me what OpenTelemetry means for the Jaeger project (incubating at CNCF), and whether it is going to replace Jaeger. I will attempt to answer these questions in this post.

Microservices and containers multiplied the complexity of Ticketmaster’s software system. Its engineers solved their debugging problems with Jaeger, an open-source tracing tool from Uber incubating at CNCF.

This post illustrates some practical examples of distributed context propagation. More detailed examples are presented in Chapter 10 of my book, Mastering Distributed Tracing.