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Application Tracing Meta Document

1. Summary

Application performance monitoring (APM) tools are becoming increasingly popular, however, the lack of formal interfaces is holding back the ecosystem. Whilst developers are inherently free to use whichever tools suit their use-cases, this is not the case for framework and library creators/maintainers.

This standard aims to create an intentionally minimalist set of interfaces that can be used to provide tracing signals to 3rd party libraries in a unified manner.

2. Why Bother?

The OpenTelemetry team are in the process of releasing a set of SDK's that would allow frameworks and libraries to send signals to providers in a uniformed manner. However, there is a perceived expectation of a 1-way flow of responsibility, where Frameworks and Libraries are expected to accept Jagger-formatted traces.

This PSR provides a bridge between Frameworks and Libraries who want to provide tracing signals, and Providers, without the requirement to make large scale changes to their infrastructure, etc.
By taking transmission mechanisms out of scope for this PSR, we drastically increase the simple adoptability of tracing for all parties involved

3. Scope

3.1 Goals

  • To provide a set of interfaces for library and framework developers to add tracing signals to their codebase.
    This would in turn allow other libraries to receive the same signals for further processing or analysis.
  • To allow traces collected by various providers to be reused by other providers.
  • This PSR may provide a minimal TraceProvider, etc. for other providers to extend, should they choose.

3.1 Non-goals

  • This PSR does not provide a comprehensive tracing client
  • This PSR does not define the mechanisms used for transmitting the data to 3rd party systems
  • This PSR does not cover collecting metrics within a codebase, only traces

4. Approaches

To fulfil the requirement of most providers, this PSR will be loosely modeled on the OpenTelemetry Tracing Specification and Tracing API.
We aim to allow the majority of providers to use the PSR interfaces with minimum backwards incompatible changes to encourage adoption.

5. People

5.1 Editor

  • Adam Allport

5.1 Sponsor

  • Alessandro Chitolina

Working Group Members

  • Alex Bouma
  • Ben Edmunds
  • Brett McBride
  • Timo Michna

6. Votes