Tips And Tricks To Successfully Migrate From Jaeger To OpenTelemetry

Migrating from OpenTracing to OpenTelemetry for improved Tracer implementation and performance

• Two levels of migration: instrumentation layer and collector layer
• OpenTelemetry shim and complete re-instrumentation are two ways to migrate at the instrumentation layer
• Complete re-instrumentation offers more capabilities and flexibility
• OpenTelemetry SDK is more performant and has access to framework plugins
• Context propagation using baggage and headers is easy in OpenTelemetry
• OpenTelemetry supports multiple context propagations
• Demo shows how to migrate from OpenTracing to OpenTelemetry

The demo is a simple app with a greeting client, formatter, and publisher. The OpenTelemetry instrumentation is shown to be more efficient and flexible than the OpenTracing instrumentation. The demo also illustrates how easy it is to use context propagation using baggage and headers in OpenTelemetry.

With Jaeger announcing the end of life for all Jaeger client libraries and recommending all users to migrate to OpenTelemetry SDKs, for many users, it is becoming important to plan an effective migration from Jaeger to OpenTelemetry. But this migration isn't simple. There are multiple ways to perform it, each one implying different tradeoffs; besides, Jaeger has some fantastic features (such as remote-controlled samplers or per- operation-based adaptive sampling) that could be lost during the migration, if best practices are not followed. In this talk, we’ll discuss some of the best approaches to the migration from Jaeger to OpenTelemetry, the different paths that organizations can take and its related implications, and what users can do to not lose any of the Jager functionality they really love when moving to OpenTelemetry. We will illustrate everything with a demo application, which will be using the Jaeger client at the start of the session and will have migrated to OpenTelemetry by the end.