OpenCensus

Easily collect telemetry like metrics and distributed traces from your services

OpenCensus and OpenTracing have merged to form OpenTelemetry, which serves as the next major version of OpenCensus and OpenTracing.

OpenTelemetry has now reached feature parity with OpenCensus, with tracing and metrics SDKs available in .NET, Golang, Java, NodeJS, and Python. All OpenCensus Github repositories, except census-instrumentation/opencensus-python, will be archived on July 31st, 2023. We encourage users to migrate to OpenTelemetry by this date.

To help you gradually migrate your instrumentation to OpenTelemetry, bridges are available in Java, Go, Python, and JS. Read the full blog post to learn more.

What is OpenCensus?

OpenCensus is a set of libraries for various languages that allow you to collect application metrics and distributed traces, then transfer the data to a backend of your choice in real time. This data can be analyzed by developers and admins to understand the health of the application and debug problems.

How can I use OpenCensus in my project?

We provide libraries for Go, Java, C#, Node.js, C++, Ruby, Erlang/Elixir, Python, Scala and PHP.

Supported backends include Azure Monitor, Datadog, Instana, Jaeger, New Relic, SignalFX, Google Cloud Monitoring + Trace, and Zipkin. You can also add support for other backends.

Who is behind it?

OpenCensus originates from Google, where a set of libraries called Census are used to automatically capture traces and metrics from services. Since going open source, the project is now composed of a group of cloud providers, application performance management vendors, and open source contributors. The project is hosted on GitHub and all work occurs there.

What data can OpenCensus collect?

Metrics are any quantifiable piece of data that you would like to track, such as latency in a service or database, request content length, or number of open file descriptors. Viewing graphs of your metrics can help you understand and gauge the performance and overall quality of your application and set of services.

Traces show you how a request propagates throughout your application or set of services. Viewing graphs of your traces can help you understand the bottlenecks in your architecture by visualizing how data flows between all of your services.

Other types of telemetry will be added to OpenCensus as the project matures. Logs will likely be added next.

How can I contribute to OpenCensus?

• Help people on the discussion forums
• Tell us your success stories using OpenCensus
• Tell us how we can improve OpenCensus, and help us do it
• Contribute to an existing library or create one for a new language

Partners & Contributors