Exposing distributed traces to OpenCensus consumers

[Alex]

I’m looking for options regarding exposing distributed traces from Istio to OpenCensus consumers.

• Has any work been done in that direction? I see what appears to be some groundwork here: https://github.com/istio/istio/tree/4090b5cecb44c285e1636ff735f319c40ff1c7fe/mixer/pkg/adapter/opencensus
• I’m considering developing an out-of-process adapter for Mixer. Is that a preferred way to achieve this kind of goal? Should I be looking at the Stackdriver adapter for guidance? https://github.com/istio/istio/tree/master/mixer/adapter/stackdriver
• If I do go down the Mixer adapter route, will Istio consider accepting such contribution into its code base so that my users wouldn’t have to use third-party docker image to access the adapter?

Thank you.

[douglas-reid]

There has been some work in this direction, but more is needed.

Making an OOP adapter would be a great way to go. I don’t know that the SD adapter is currently OOP, but it could provide a look at tracing. I would also look at the recently added Zipkin-compatible adapter.

I don’t know that adding the adapter into the Istio codebase is the best path forward. We have been steering people towards out-of-tree adapters, and I’d expect that to be the way things continue. One place that it might make sense to host the adapter code may be in the OpenCensus org.

Feel free to bring this topic to the next P&T WG meeting.