zipkin VS sentry-java

Zipkin is an open-source distributed tracing system that helps gather timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems in microservice architectures. It manages the collection, storage, and querying of tracing data, providing a user-friendly interface to analyze traces.

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.

Check out the Sentry docs for your preferred SDK, or create a new project in Sentry where you’ll be guided through the setup process.

>As now we've introduced some peers code review, automatic testing on most critical stuff (but since the codebase sucks these aren't really reliable tests)

They may not be "reliable", but these are your safety net, or harness, so you don't fall. I wrote about similar issues, for instance here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26591067 and, given your promotion, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37211796. It contains a few steps starting from "So...".

You can add monitoring, something like Sentry (https://sentry.io) will capture exceptions that were not handled that you have not seen because the stack trace is buried in hundreds of pages of logs or something. It groups them by exception and counts them. It's pretty awesome. (https://docs.sentry.io). It supports around 108 platforms (Java, Python, JavaScript, etc.). This lets you see the exceptions and makes prioritizing easier (which ones are the most frequent, which ones impact the most, etc.).

If you don't have them already, issue templates are really useful and the comment I linked to explains why, but here's an example of an issue template (again, you can configure them for different types of issues so team members select from a dropdown for a bug or a feature):

But, from my understanding, it targeted only software developers that would like to have super-deep insights into the applications and is not intended for monitoring simple apps like websites. Also, I have no idea even if I embed it, whether will it be able to tell me if my resources loaded or the performance didn't go well. For example, I don't see how I can easily embed it into my website: https://docs.sentry.io/ only programming languages are listed here.

Sentry provides informative guides for many platforms. In our server's case, we apply Apollo Server v2 as an Express middleware; therefore, Sentry's Express Guide with request, tracing, and error handlers is a great starting point.

The last step is to extract the openReplaySessionToken from the header and add it to your Sentry scope (ideally using a middleware or decorator) in your backend. The method to do this depends on the programming language of your backend, you can consult the Sentry docs on how to configure scope. The snippet below shows how to configure a Sentry scope if your backend is built with node.js/express

In a lot of cases crash report SDKs are open source?

Sentry: https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-java