federation VS zipkin

Compare federation vs zipkin and see what are their differences.

federation

🌐  Build and scale a single data graph across multiple services with Apollo's federation gateway. (by apollographql)
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federation zipkin
3 36
646 16,729
1.2% 0.7%
9.4 9.4
2 days ago 7 days ago
TypeScript Java
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

federation

Posts with mentions or reviews of federation. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2021-07-29.
  • Apollo Federation Custom Scalars
    1 project | /r/graphql | 9 Apr 2023
    I feel like we ran into this recently at work but not with custom scalars etc. My colleague raised an issue for it. Hope this helps in some way.
  • Apollo Federation Input type union merge
    1 project | /r/graphql | 5 Oct 2022
    as per the Github issue here. However I have trouble understanding this statement. Why can't the gateway pick and choose which input fields are routed to each subgraph? Isn't it the responsibility of the supergraph SDL and the gateway to do exactly this, this same way it does for entities? What limitations are there that make merging input types using the union strategy not viable?
  • The Stack #3
    22 projects | dev.to | 29 Jul 2021
    Federation comes with its own specification and directives as part of it which helps people to define all of the relations between multiple GraphQL entities so that the Apollo Gateway can combine them all together without having to modify the GraphQL gateway and also functions like __resolveReference which helps in resolving an entity with its reference as specified by the directives.

zipkin

Posts with mentions or reviews of zipkin. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-19.
  • Enhancing API Observability Series (Part 3): Tracing
    3 projects | dev.to | 19 Mar 2024
    When choosing distributed tracing tools, considerations include your technology stack, business requirements, and monitoring complexity. Zipkin, SkyWalking, and OpenTelemetry are popular distributed tracing solutions, each with its unique features.
  • The Road to GraphQL At Enterprise Scale
    6 projects | dev.to | 8 Nov 2023
    From the perspective of the realization of GraphQL infrastructure, the interesting direction is "Finding". How to find the problem? How to find the bottleneck of the system? Distributed Tracing System (DTS) will help answer this question. Distributed tracing is a method of observing requests as they propagate through distributed environments. In our scenario, we have dozens of subgraphs, gateway, and transport layer through which the request goes. We have several tools that can be used to detect the whole lifecycle of the request through the system, e.g. Jaeger, Zipkin or solutions that provided DTS as a part of the solution NewRelic.
  • OpenTelemetry Exporters - Types and Configuration Steps
    5 projects | dev.to | 30 Oct 2023
    Zipkin is a distributed tracing system used for tracking and analyzing how requests move through complex systems, especially in setups with many interconnected services, known as microservices.
  • The Complete Microservices Guide
    17 projects | dev.to | 21 Sep 2023
    Distributed Tracing: Middleware for distributed tracing like Jaeger and Zipkin helps monitor and trace requests as they flow through multiple microservices, aiding in debugging, performance optimization, and understanding the system's behavior.
  • zipkin VS openobserve - a user suggested alternative
    2 projects | 8 Sep 2023
  • The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Sequence Diagrams in MermaidJS
    12 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Jul 2023
    For microservice tracing, you might want to look at Zipkin [0], or OpenTelemetry [1]

    [0] https://zipkin.io/

  • Analytics for aspnet core apis?
    3 projects | /r/dotnet | 9 May 2023
    I’ve not used a self-hosted solution before, but here’s one I found. https://zipkin.io/
  • Show HN: Uptrace – open-source APM (alternative to Datadog, NewRelic)
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Apr 2023
    > IMO the reason these vendors can and do charge so much is not because telemetry software is hard.

    I always saw it as "they are charging for their polished UI/experience"

    The UI of https://zipkin.io/ versus DataDog is kind of... not really in the same ballpark?

  • Is there a beginners guide to adding observability to your applications?
    4 projects | /r/sre | 6 Mar 2023
    There are the zipkin https://zipkin.io/ and jaeger https://www.jaegertracing.io/ packages/components you can use both have quickstarts if you consider that to be a beginner's guide.
  • How to monitor Python application performance
    5 projects | dev.to | 15 Feb 2023
    Zipkin, which was developed by Twitter, is an open source tool for distributed tracing that can also be used to troubleshoot latency issues in your application. While Zipkin is Java-based, py_zipkin is an implementation for Python.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing federation and zipkin you can also consider the following projects:

jaeger - CNCF Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing Platform

skywalking - APM, Application Performance Monitoring System

mercurius - Implement GraphQL servers and gateways with Fastify

sentry-java - A Sentry SDK for Java, Android and other JVM languages.

graphql-live-query - Realtime GraphQL Live Queries with JavaScript

Fluentd - Fluentd: Unified Logging Layer (project under CNCF)

supergraph-demo - 🍿 Compose subgraphs into a Federation v1 supergraph at build-time with static composition to power a federated graph router at runtime.

opentelemetry-specification - Specifications for OpenTelemetry

graphql-editor - 📺 Visual Editor & GraphQL IDE.

brave - Java distributed tracing implementation compatible with Zipkin backend services.

subscriptions-transport-ws - :arrows_clockwise: A WebSocket client + server for GraphQL subscriptions

signoz - SigNoz is an open-source observability platform native to OpenTelemetry with logs, traces and metrics in a single application. An open-source alternative to DataDog, NewRelic, etc. 🔥 🖥. 👉 Open source Application Performance Monitoring (APM) & Observability tool