We are happy to announce that Microsoft is joining the open source OpenCensus project, originally initiated and shepherded by Google, and we are excited to help it achieve the goal of “a single distribution of libraries for metrics and distributed tracing with minimal overhead.”



Modern cloud applications are typically distributed in nature and require specialized monitoring and observation techniques to track down failures and performance problems. Azure Application Insights provides Application Map and End-to-End Transaction Diagnostics capabilities to help solve many of the challenges of monitoring a modern cloud application.

However, the challenge monitoring tools face today is the lack of a standardized platform for instrumenting metrics and distributed traces that works across various programming languages and technologies. Our goal is to leverage our experience and knowledge and combine it with that of OpenCensus community to create an open and extensible, standard platform for application metrics and distributed traces that will benefit all customers.

While we are excited about today’s announcement, we know that we have a long way to go as we begin the journey of partnering with OpenCensus and incorporating the benefits of its platform into Application Insights. Watch this blog, as well as the OpenCensus blog, for more details to come. In the meantime, we’d love to hear your feedback in the comments below.



