Currently, there are a number of solutions out there in the wild that provide the functionality of implementing tracing for applications. Some of these solutions are proprietary, while the others are open source in nature.

As a developer, you are free to choose any of them based on the requirements of the application, and what facilities are provided by the solution you have chosen. But the problem is, what happens if you want to move to a different tracing solution because the solution provides better features and more control over the environment? Now you are stuck because you might need to change a lot of things in your infrastructure and the application code to get the new tracing solution to work. That's a lot of trouble.

The OpenTracing standard provides a common set of vendor neutral APIs and instrumentation for implementing distributed tracing inside the applications. Any tracing solution that implements this set of standard APIs is compatible with the OpenTracing standard, and can interoperate with the other tools that follow the same standard.

Our choice of Jaeger as a tracing tool for our demo applications is also an OpenTracing compliant tool. Now, without spending any more time, let's get our hands dirty by implementing tracing inside the application we built in the previous chapter.