Service

• Introduction
• References

Introduction

The OpenCensus Service is a set of components that can collect traces and metrics from processes instrumented by OpenCensus or other monitoring/tracing libraries (Jaeger, Prometheus, etc.), do aggregation and smart sampling, and export traces and metrics to one or more monitoring/tracing backends.

Some frameworks and ecosystems provide out-of-the-box instrumentation by using OpenCensus, but the user is still expected to register an exporter in order to export data. This is a problem during an incident. Even though our users can benefit from having more diagnostics data coming out of services already instrumented with OpenCensus, they have to modify their code to register an exporter and redeploy. Asking our users recompile and redeploy is not an ideal at an incident time. In addition, currently users need to decide which service backend they want to export to, before they distribute their binary instrumented by OpenCensus.

The OpenCensus Service is trying to eliminate these requirements. With the OpenCensus Service, users do not need to redeploy or restart their applications as long as it has the OpenCensus exporter. All they need to do is just configure and deploy the OpenCensus Service separately. The OpenCensus Service will then automatically collect traces and metrics and export to any backend of users’ choice.

The OpenCensus Service consists of two components: the OpenCensus Agent and the OpenCensus Collector. For the detailed design specs, please see DESIGN.md.

References