---
id: opentracing
version: "2.4.0"
license: Apache License 2.0
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: abandoned
---

# opentracing — OpenTracing API for Python. See documentation at http://opentracing.io

License: permissive · Maintenance: abandoned · Downloads: 812.9K/mo

## What it is and what it does

OpenTracing is a vendor-neutral API specification for distributed tracing in Python. It defines interfaces for creating spans (units of work), managing trace context across service boundaries, and propagating tracing information through HTTP headers or other carriers. The library itself provides only the API contract and a basic no-op implementation; actual tracing backends (like Zipkin or Jaeger) are implemented separately by instrumentation libraries.

The package is designed for use by framework and library authors who want to instrument their code to participate in distributed traces. It handles three core tasks: extracting trace context from inbound requests, storing the active span in request-local storage via a ScopeManager, and injecting trace context into outbound calls. Multiple ScopeManager implementations are included for thread-local, gevent, Tornado, asyncio, and contextvars-based storage.

Use it for:

- Instrument a web service to extract and propagate trace context from incoming HTTP requests to child spans for outbound calls
- Create a custom ScopeManager for an async framework to manage active spans across coroutines or tasks
- Build an instrumentation library that wraps a third-party service client to automatically create and tag spans for each call
- Integrate with a tracing backend by implementing a Tracer that records spans and sends them to a collector
- Propagate trace IDs across microservices to correlate logs and metrics from a single user request

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

Provides the OpenTracing API for Python, enabling distributed tracing instrumentation across services through span creation, context propagation, and scope management.

No. The package is abandoned (repository archived, no releases since 2020-11-19, last commit 2022-07-01) and the OpenTracing standard itself has been superseded by OpenTelemetry. While the API remains stable and has no known vulnerabilities, new projects should adopt OpenTelemetry instead. Use this only if you are maintaining legacy code that already depends on it.

## Install

pip install opentracing
uv add opentracing
poetry add opentracing

## Installing opentracing

Before you install: High install friction; the package is abandoned (last commit 2022-07-01, repository archived) and has not been released in over 3 years. No runtime dependencies, but maintenance has ceased entirely.

License in practice: Licensed under Apache License 2.0 (permissive). You may use, modify, and distribute this package freely in commercial and open-source projects, provided you include the license notice.

Quickstart:

pip install opentracing==2.4.0

import opentracing
from opentracing.scope_managers import ThreadLocalScopeManager

tracer = opentracing.Tracer(scope_manager=ThreadLocalScopeManager())
with tracer.start_active_span('operation_name', finish_on_close=True) as scope:
    scope.span.set_tag('key', 'value')

The package is abandoned; no active maintenance or support. Classifiers list Python 2.7, 3.5–3.7; compatibility with modern Python versions is unverified.

Verify before relying:

- Whether the API remains compatible with modern Python versions beyond those listed in classifiers (3.5–3.7)
- Whether instrumentation libraries and tracer implementations built on this API are still actively maintained
- Current state of the OpenTracing specification and whether it has been superseded by OpenTelemetry or other standards

## Package facts

- License: Apache License 2.0 (permissive)
- Python support: unspecified
- Install friction: high
- Maintenance: abandoned
- Downloads: 812.9K/month (top 5,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

distributed tracing api, opentracing python, span context propagation, request tracing instrumentation, trace context management, service call tracing, distributed request tracking, distributed-tracing, abandoned, instrumentation

[View on SkillFed](https://skillfed.io/packages/opentracing) · [View on PyPI](https://pypi.org/project/opentracing/)