Logs, metrics and traces are the three pillars of the Observability world. The distributed tracing world, in particular, has seen a lot of innovation in recent months, with OpenTelemetry standardization and with Jaeger open source project graduating from the CNCF incubation. According to the recent DevOps Pulse report, Jaeger is used by over 30% of those practicing distributed tracing.

I have been following distributed tracing technologies — Zipkin, OpenTracing, Jaeger, and others — for several years, without deeply trialing with any of them. Just prior to the holidays, we were having a number of those “why is this slow?” questions about an express application, written in typescript, providing an API endpoint.