Overview

OpenTelemetry (formed through a merger of the OpenTracing and OpenCensus projects) is a collection of APIs, SDKs, and tools to instrument, generate, collect, and export telemetry data like metrics, logs, and distributed traces. OpenTelemetry is vendor-neutral open-source observability framework and as an industry-standard, it is natively supported by a number of vendors. From the instrumentation perspective, there is support for quite a few programming languages, including dedicated Java APIs. Starting from 3.5.7 /3.6.2 / 4.0.3 releases, Apache CXF fully supports integration (through cxf-integration-tracing-opentelemetry module) with OpenTelemetry distributed tracing capabilities.

The section dedicated to Apache HTrace has pretty good introduction into distributed tracing basics however OpenTelemetry specification abstracts a lot of things, outlining just a general APIs to denote the Span lifecycle and injection points to propagate the context across many distributed components. As such, the intrinsic details about HTTP headers f.e. becomes an integral part of the distributed tracer of your choice, out of reach for Apache CXF.

Distributed Tracing in Apache CXF using OpenTelemetry

TBD