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If you are familiar with instrumenting applications, you may have heard of OpenMetrics, OpenTracing, and OpenCensus. These projects aim to create standards for application performance monitoring and collecting metric data. Although the projects do overlap in terms of their goals, they each take a different approach to observability and instrumentation. In this post, we’ll provide an introduction to all three projects, along with some key differentiators of each, and how they best support application monitoring. OpenMetrics aims to create a standard format for exposing metric data, while OpenTracing and OpenCensus focus on creating a standard for distributed tracing. Because the OpenCensus and OpenTracing projects share similar goals, there is a lot of overlap with their tracing APIs.