tiltrak

Tiltrak is a lightweight, open-standard framework for structured event logging and traceability across distributed software systems. It defines a compact, language-agnostic event format and a reference implementation that enables correlation of actions across services, components, and infrastructure.

Event model: an event has a type, timestamp, traceId, spanId, userId (optional), and a payload as a map of key-value pairs. Traces are sequences of related events that share a traceId. The tiltrak format supports nesting, tagging, and sampling. A tiltrak registry provides schema definitions and versioning to promote interoperability. Client libraries exist for major languages, and there are adapters to push events to storage backends such as time-series databases or log aggregators.

History and governance: Tiltrak originated in 2021 as an open community project led by the Tiltrak Alliance. The alliance maintains a publicly documented specification and a reference runtime, while independent contributors implement language bindings and backend integrations. The project emphasizes backward compatibility and vendor-neutral guidelines.

Applications and reception: Tiltrak is used for tracing user sessions, debugging distributed transactions, and auditing changes in complex deployments. Proponents cite simplicity and cross-language compatibility; critics point to a lack of formal certification and potential performance overhead in high-throughput systems.

See also: Observability, distributed tracing, event-driven architectures, logging standards.