Sunsetting OpenCensus

By Aaron Abbott (Google) |

In 2019, we announced that OpenTracing and OpenCensus would be merging to form the OpenTelemetry project. From the start, we considered OpenTelemetry to be the next major version of both OpenTracing and OpenCensus.

We are excited to announce that OpenTelemetry has reached feature parity with OpenCensus in C++, .NET, Go, Java, JavaScript, PHP and Python. Stable releases of both the Tracing and Metrics SDKs are available in most of these languages with Go and PHP soon to follow. This means that OpenTelemetry can collect and export telemetry data with the same level of functionality as OpenCensus. Beyond that, OpenTelemetry offers a richer ecosystem of instrumentation libraries and exporters, and an active open source community.

As a result, we will be archiving all OpenCensus GitHub repositories (with the exception of census-instrumentation/opencensus-python1) on July 31st, 2023. We are excited to see the long term plan for OpenTelemetry coming to fruition and encourage all users of OpenCensus to migrate to OpenTelemetry.

How to Migrate to OpenTelemetry

One of the key goals of the OpenTelemetry project is to provide backward compatibility with OpenCensus and a migration story for existing users.

To help ease the migration path, we have provided backward compatibility bridges in Go, Java, JavaScript2, and Python2. Installing these bridges allows OpenCensus and OpenTelemetry instrumentation to smoothly interoperate, with all of your telemetry flowing out of OpenTelemetry exporters. This lets OpenCensus users incrementally transition all of their instrumentation from OpenCensus to OpenTelemetry, and finally remove OpenCensus libraries from their applications3.

While OpenTelemetry was never intended to be a strict superset of OpenCensus, most of the APIs and data models are compatible. Migration should be considered a “major version bump” and you may notice some changes in your telemetry.

More details on what to expect and some suggested workflows for migration are outlined in the OpenCensus Compatibility specification4.

What to Expect After July 31st, 2023

After July 31st, 2023, the OpenCensus project will no longer be maintained. This means that there will be no new features added to the project, and any security vulnerabilities that are found will not be patched.

However, the OpenCensus repositories will remain archived on GitHub. This means users will still be able to download the OpenCensus code and use it in their projects. Existing releases of OpenCensus will remain available in public package repositories like NPM and PyPI. We encourage all OpenCensus users to begin planning your migration to OpenTelemetry now.

One exception to this is the census-instrumentation/opencensus-python1 repo.

  1. A number of projects within this repository are still being used as recommended production solutions. These projects will continue to be maintained. Please reach out to the individual maintainers for details regarding maintenance timeline, next steps for migration and general support questions. ↩︎ ↩︎

  2. Python and JavaScript shim packages are currently unreleased but will be available in future releases. ↩︎ ↩︎

  3. These shims implement the stable OpenCensus Compatibility specification4 and will be supported for at least one year following OpenTelemetry’s long term support guidelines. ↩︎

  4. The OpenCensus Compatability specification is marked stable for the next specification release. ↩︎ ↩︎