In OpenTracing the fundamental concept for representing distributed traces is the (time) span: something that starts and then finishes, can be annotated with key-value pairs and can be “causally” related. This representation gained popularity with Google’s Dapper paper and triggered open-source tracing implementations like Zipkin and Jaeger and eventually the OpenTracing specification, but according to the academic literature it is not the only one. In spite its popularity, the span based trace representation has some shortcomings that limit its applicability.
These reside in the lack of precise definition of the meaning of spans and their relations and the representation being tightly coupled to the synchronous RPC programming model. In this writeup I would like to show how OpenTracing could overcome these shortcomings by defining an alternate trace model centered on the notion of events. The new trace model would allow for preserving the compatibility of existing instrumentations while opening up the way for extensions to other, non-RPC programing models.
Source: medium.com