Document open-tracing to open-telemetry migration path.

[daixiang0]

Hi!
It is a very awesome project for tracing!
We want to move OpenTracing to OpenTelemetry, still keep support for existing providers is preserved: Jaeger, Elastic, Lightstep, Stackdriver.
I see the plan, there is no plan mentioned about Elastic or Lightstep, is there any plan about it?
It would be very helpful!

[paivagustavo]

Hi @daixiang0, thanks for the words and for the interest.

OpenTelemery decided to only maintain a limited number of exporter for some open source backends. That means that other exporter are either created/maintained by companies or individuals that wants to contribute.

There is a link that you can use for finding compatible exporter here: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-go#compatible-exporters
There you can find that there is already exporters for Lightstep, HoneyComb, NewRelic and others. About elastic exporter, I don't know if it is already exist.

Hope that helps.

[daixiang0]

@paivagustavo thanks for quick input, could you add an example about bridge usage? It would be more clear than the doc for new users like me.

[iredelmeier]

How about a list in the README linking to proprietary exporters? (This would likely also be relevant with #449)

[daixiang0]

Could you add an example about bridge usage?

[andrewhsu]

@daixiang0 in regards to your desire to move OpenTracing to OpenTelemetry, the opentelemetry-go project is based on the specification work that is ongoing in opentelemetry-specification and there is still a bit of work to get the specification to 1.0 release so opentelemetry-go can fully implement. Here is a list of the milestones set back in October 2019 for the specification which should give you an idea of the roadmap: https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/blob/a131ae1ccabee8cc8f3b8cf109b81be378006fea/milestones.md

Speaking just for LightStep, there is also a bit of work that needs to be done before the work put into opentelemetry-go is ready for customers and we're actively planning for this as the specification rolls along.

[daixiang0]

Good to heard it, i would have a try and wait for the 1.0 golang version release.

[rghetia]

@jmacd will find someone to take this. Might be done after the milestone.

[nchandran3]

On a similar note, if the rest of the ecosystem is adhering to OpenTracing spans and serialization, will OpenTelemetry be backwards compatible with its standard for how span context is represented?

As in, can I have a mix of OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry compatible services, that can all talk to each other without being privy to which standard the rest of the systems are using? Does the span context serialize in a standardized, equivalent way in both standards?