Azure Monitor vs OpenTracing: What are the differences?

Azure Monitor vs. OpenTracing

Azure Monitor and OpenTracing are two widely used tools in the field of monitoring and observing applications. Both tools have their unique features and capabilities that cater to different needs of organizations. In this comparison, we will highlight the key differences between Azure Monitor and OpenTracing.

1. **Scope of Monitoring**:
Azure Monitor is a comprehensive monitoring tool provided by Microsoft Azure that enables monitoring of various services, applications, and infrastructure components within the Azure ecosystem. On the other hand, OpenTracing is a vendor-neutral project that focuses on providing a standard for distributed tracing, making it easier to monitor microservices-based applications regardless of the underlying technology stack.

2. **Data Collection**:
Azure Monitor collects monitoring data from various Azure services, virtual machines, and on-premises resources to provide insights and metrics. It offers a centralized platform for collecting, analyzing, and visualizing monitoring data. In contrast, OpenTracing focuses on collecting distributed traces to capture the flow of requests across microservices. It provides a way to instrument applications to generate distributed traces for debugging and performance analysis.

3. **Integration**:
Azure Monitor is deeply integrated with other Azure services such as Azure Log Analytics, Azure Application Insights, and Azure Storage for storing and analyzing monitoring data. It is tightly coupled with Azure's ecosystem, offering seamless integration with Azure resources. OpenTracing, on the other hand, is designed to be vendor-neutral and can be integrated with various tracing backends and tools such as Jaeger, Zipkin, and LightStep, making it suitable for multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments.

4. **Granularity of Monitoring**:
Azure Monitor provides detailed monitoring capabilities at various levels, including infrastructure monitoring, application monitoring, and logging. It offers customizable alerts, dashboards, and logs for in-depth analysis of system performance. In contrast, OpenTracing focuses on distributed tracing at the application level, providing visibility into the interactions between services and components. It offers end-to-end tracing across microservices to identify bottlenecks and latency issues.

5. **Ease of Use**:
Azure Monitor offers a user-friendly interface, predefined metrics, and monitoring templates for easy configuration and setup. It provides built-in monitoring solutions for different Azure services, making it easy to start monitoring resources without additional configurations. OpenTracing, on the other hand, requires manual instrumentation of applications using OpenTracing APIs to generate traces. Setting up OpenTracing involves more effort in instrumenting applications compared to the out-of-the-box monitoring capabilities of Azure Monitor.

In Summary, Azure Monitor and OpenTracing differ in their scope of monitoring, data collection methods, integration capabilities, granularity of monitoring, and ease of use, catering to different monitoring requirements of organizations.