OpenZipkin

What OpenZipkin is

OpenZipkin is the open-source organization that stewards Zipkin code, documentation, specifications, and support; Zipkin was originally created at Twitter. The tracing system collects and looks up data to help troubleshoot latency in service architectures. Users can open a trace by ID or search by service, operation name, tags, and duration. Its interface summarizes the share of time spent in each service and whether operations failed, and includes a dependency diagram showing how many traced requests passed through each application. Applications must be instrumented to report trace data, with transports including HTTP, Kafka, ActiveMQ, gRPC, and RabbitMQ. Listed storage choices range from in-memory storage to MySQL, Cassandra, and Elasticsearch. The instrumentation list covers libraries for languages including C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Scala, PHP, Python, and Lua. Zipkin can be run with Docker, Java, Homebrew, or from source; the self-contained executable JAR requires Java 17 or higher. It is free and self-hosted, with OpenTelemetry support, but its web UI has no built-in authentication.