zipkin VS consul

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.

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.

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.

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.

For microservice tracing, you might want to look at Zipkin [0], or OpenTelemetry [1]

[0] https://zipkin.io/

I’ve not used a self-hosted solution before, but here’s one I found. https://zipkin.io/

> 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?

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.

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.

The JHipster scaffolded sample application has a gateway application and two microservices. It uses Consul for service discovery and centralized configuration.

Service Discovery: Microservices need to discover and communicate with each other dynamically. Service discovery tools like etcd, Consul, or Kubernetes built-in service discovery mechanisms help locate and connect to microservices running on different nodes within the infrastructure.

After some research and testing, I landed on using Consul and Fabio as the demo infrastructure. Of course, there is a myriad of other options to accomplish this task, but because of the low configuration and ease of use, I was impressed with this pairing. Both projects are mature and well-supported, and very flexible--just because you can run them with low configuration, doesn't mean you have to. I wanted to keep this demo constrained, but the exercise did get me excited about exploring things further: circuit breakers, traffic splitting, and more complex service meshes.

The goal is to be able to use Consul SD configurations to allow for retrieving scrape targets from consul. Is this possible? Can anyone provide an example? Thank you!!

https://github.com/hashicorp/consul/pull/12080 - this should be the Consul issue that brought down Roblox

The Consul collector is production ready! Consul by HashiCorp is a powerful and complex identity-based networking solution, which is not trivial to monitor. We were lucky to have the assistance of HashiCorp itself in this endeavor, which resulted in a monitoring solution of exceptional quality. Look for common blog posts and announcements in the coming weeks!

Changed the service discovery to Consul, since this is the default in JHipster 8.

In another effort to standardize development and operations, Lob has just wrapped up our container orchestration migration from Convox to HashiCorp’s Nomad, led by Senior Platform Engineer Elijah Voigt. In this new ecosystem, one feature available to us is Consul Service Mesh (a feature of Consul, which is part of our Lob Nomad stack).

Service registry and discovery etcd, consul, nacos