Author of the post here. I was the tech lead for Zipkin at Twitter, implemented tracing system at Pinterest[1] and a contributor to the Open tracing spec[2]. So

Author of the post here. I was the tech lead for Zipkin at Twitter, implemented tracing system at Pinterest[1] and a contributor to the Open tracing spec[2]. So, limited consideration of existing tools may not be too accurate of a description :). A SpanEvent is a simpler span. Regular Span - Annotations(nested structures) = SpanEvent. Most developers don't think about using spans to represent DAGs in their applications. The goal of a SpanEvent is to aid developers to think in terms of DAGs. In my experience, with some care and clever code, you can use existing Span formats. But, most developers give up and do something else instead. [1] https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/distributed-tracing-at-pinterest-with-new-open-source-tools-a4f8a5562f6b https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/distributed-tracing... [2] https://opentracing.io/specification/organization/ https://opentracing.io/specification/organization/