pprof VS zipkin

Compare pprof vs zipkin and see what are their differences.

pprof

pprof is a tool for visualization and analysis of profiling data (by google)
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pprof zipkin
12 36
7,450 16,713
2.5% 0.6%
7.6 9.4
about 16 hours ago 8 days ago
Go Java
Apache License 2.0 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.

pprof

Posts with mentions or reviews of pprof. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-01-25.
  • Profiling Caddy
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Feb 2024
    The pprof format is not tied to Go. From my understanding, it's used within Google across multiple languages. The format is defined in the pprof repository[0], and the visualization tool is source-language agnostic. I've seen libraries in numerous languages (e.g. Python, Java) to publish profiles in pprof format. This is an indicator the pprof format has become de-facto. Grafana Pyroscope[1] is a tool that's capable of parsing the pprof format, agnostic to the source programming language, and has instructions for Go, Java, Python, Ruby, node.js, Rust, and .NET.

    My understanding is that you're searching for a combination of the profiles, metrics, and tracing. Caddy supports all 3.

    [0] https://github.com/google/pprof/blob/main/doc/README.md

    [1] https://grafana.com/docs/pyroscope/latest/

    metrics and tracing need to be manually enabled (for now, perhaps)

  • Why So Slow? Using Profilers to Pinpoint the Reasons of Performance Degradation
    2 projects | dev.to | 25 Jan 2023
    Because we couldn't identify the issue using the results we got from Callgrind, we reached for another profiler, gperftools. It's a sampling profiler and therefor it has a smaller impact on the application's performance in exchange for less accurate call statistics. After filtering out the unimportant parts and visualizing the rest with pprof, it was evident that something strange was happening with the send function. It took only 71 milliseconds with the previous implementation and more than 900 milliseconds with the new implementation of our Bolt server. It was very suspicious, but based on Callgrind, its cost was almost the same as before. We were confused as the two results seemed to conflict with each other.
  • Improving the performance of your code starting with Go
    4 projects | dev.to | 9 Dec 2022
    github.com - google/pprof
  • Proposal to Support Timestamps and Labels in Pprof Events
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Oct 2022
  • A Generic Approach to Troubleshooting
    4 projects | dev.to | 20 Sep 2022
    The application performances in a specific code path (e.g. gdb, pprof, …).
  • Does rust have a visual analysis tool for memory and performance like pprof of golang?
    11 projects | /r/rust | 14 May 2022
    pprof is https://github.com/google/pprof, it's a very useful tool in golang , and really really really convenient
  • pprof - tool for visualization and analysis of profiling data
    1 project | /r/github_trends | 2 May 2022
  • Tokio Console
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Dec 2021
    Go also has pretty good out of the box profiling (pprof[0]) and third-party runtime debugging (delv[1]) that can be used both remotely and local.

    These tools also have decent editor integration and can be use hand in hand:

    https://blog.jetbrains.com/go/2019/04/03/profiling-go-applic...

    https://blog.jetbrains.com/go/2020/03/03/how-to-find-gorouti...

    [0] https://github.com/google/pprof

    [1] https://github.com/go-delve/delve

  • Cats and Clouds – There Are No Pillars in Observability with Yoshi Yamaguchi
    8 projects | dev.to | 3 Nov 2021
    And what we do in Google Cloud is that we still use the pprof. But it's a kind of forked version of the pprof because the visualization part is totally different. So we give that tool as the Cloud Profiler. So that is the product name. And then, the difference between the pprof and a Cloud Profiler is that Cloud Profiler provides the agent library for each famous programming language such as Java, Python, Node.js, and Go. And then what you need to do is to just write 5 to 10 lines of code in a new application. That launches the profile agent in your application as a subsidiary thread of the main thread. And then, that thread periodically collects the profile data of the application and then sends that data back to Google Cloud and the Cloud Profiler.
  • Is there a way I can visualize all the function calls made while running the project(C++) in a graphical way?
    8 projects | /r/cpp | 15 Jun 2021
    gprftools (https://github.com/gperftools/gperftools) can be easily plugged in using LD_PRELOAD and signal, and has nice go implemented visualization tool https://github.com/google/pprof.

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 pprof and zipkin you can also consider the following projects:

gperftools - Main gperftools repository

skywalking - APM, Application Performance Monitoring System

prometheus - The Prometheus monitoring system and time series database.

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

jaeger - CNCF Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing Platform

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

tracy - Frame profiler

opentelemetry-specification - Specifications for OpenTelemetry

parca - Continuous profiling for analysis of CPU and memory usage, down to the line number and throughout time. Saving infrastructure cost, improving performance, and increasing reliability.

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

massif-visualizer - Visualizer for Valgrind Massif data files

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