Swift Distributed Tracing

A Distributed Tracing API for Swift.

This is a collection of Swift types enabling the instrumentation of server side applications using tools such as tracers. Our goal is to provide a common foundation that allows to freely choose how to instrument systems with minimal changes to your actual code.

While Swift Distributed Tracing allows building all kinds of instruments, which can co-exist in applications transparently, its primary use is instrumenting multi-threaded and distributed systems with Distributed Traces.

This project uses the context propagation type defined independently in:

swift-service-context -- ServiceContext (zero dependencies)

Compatibility

This project is designed in a very open and extensible manner, such that various instrumentation and tracing systems can be built on top of it.

The purpose of the tracing package is to serve as common API for all tracer and instrumentation implementations. Thanks to this, libraries may only need to be instrumented once, and then be used with any tracer which conforms to this API.

Tracing Backends

Compatible Tracer implementations:

Library	Status	Description
@swift-otel / Swift OTel	🟢 Updated for 1.0	Exports spans to OpenTelemetry Collector; Compatible with Zipkin, X-Ray Jaeger, and more.
Your library?	...	Get in touch!

If you know of any other library please send in a pull request to add it to the list, thank you!

Supported Libraries & Frameworks

The following is a, non-complete, list of a few libraries and frameworks which provide built-in support for distributed tracing. This list is not complete, however if you'd like to feature your library in the list below, feel free to open a pull request adding it.

Library / Framework	Integrates	Status
AsyncHTTPClient 1.29.0+	Tracing	🟢 Built-in support
Hummingbird	Tracing	🟢 Built-in support
Vapor	Tracing	🟢 Built-in support
Valkey Swift	Tracing	🟢 Built-in support
gRPC Swift 2	Tracing	🟢 `grpc-swift-extras` middleware
Your library?	...	Get in touch!

If you know of any other library please send in a pull request to add it to the list, thank you!

Reference Documentation

Please refer to the reference documentation for detailed guides about adopting distributed tracing in your applications, libraries and frameworks.