Before we jump into the exercises, let's talk about the OpenTracing project. In October 2015, Adrian Cole, the lead maintainer of Zipkin, organized and hosted a "Distributed Tracing and Zipkin Workshop" at the Pivotal office in San Francisco. The attendees were a mix of commercial tracing vendors, open source developers, and engineers from a number of companies who were in charge of building or deploying tracing infrastructure in their organizations.
A common theme in the hallway conversations was that the single largest obstacle to the wide adoption of tracing in large organizations was the lack of reusable instrumentation for a vast number of open source frameworks and libraries, due to the absence of standard APIs. It was forcing all vendors; open source tracing systems, like Zipkin; and the end users to implement instrumentation over and over for the same popular software and frameworks.
The group collaborated on the first version of a common instrumentation API, which eventually...