Terminology
Jaeger represents tracing data in a data model inspired by the OpenTracing Specification . The data model is logically very similar to OpenTelemetry Traces , with some naming differences:
Jaeger | OpenTelemetry | Notes |
---|---|---|
Tags | Attributes | Both support typed values, but nested tags are not supported in Jaeger. |
Span Logs | Span Events | Point-in-time events on the span recorded in a structured form. |
Span References | Span Links | Jaeger’s Span References have a required type (child-of or follows-from ) and always refer to predecessor spans; OpenTelemetry’s Span Links have no type, but allow attributes. |
Process | Resource | A struct describing the entity that produces the telemetry. |
Span
A span represents a logical unit of work that has an operation name, the start time of the operation, and the duration. Spans may be nested and ordered to model causal relationships.
Trace
A trace represents the data or execution path through the system. It can be thought of as a directed acyclic graph of spans.
Baggage
Baggage is arbitrary user-defined metadata (key-value pairs) that can be attached to distributed context and propagated by the tracing SDKs. See W3C Baggage for more information.