Language neutral trace format

Question

I am looking for a programming language neutral file format for call traces.

I am looking for a trace similar to set -x in the bash shell. Or like the output of python-hunter

First step would be to store all method calls and every line which gets executed by the run-time.

Simplification: For me it is enough to trace single process, single thread execution. No parallelism.

Next step would be to trace http calls (microservices) which are involved.

I develop with Python, but the trace file format needs to be language neutral.

Answer 1

You labeled this question with jaeger and opentracing, and I'm afraid there's no standard wire format for OpenTracing. Jaeger has its own format, but it's not really documented (yet!). The closest to a standard in this area is B3 from Zipkin.

Outside of the OpenTracing and distributed tracing world, there are some formats that you could use, like the Common Tracing Format or pcap.

Note that tracing local process calls in a single-threaded environment (like tapping into syscalls or kernel events) is very different than tracing microservices calls, mostly because your application needs to pass the "context" over the wire to the next service, to establish the correlation between the calls.