zipkin VS skywalking

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.

> I maintain that any platform that isn’t using some sort of tracing system is practically negligent in their engineering duty.

For some, it's difficult because many of the self-hostable out there are rather complex and have high requirements, like https://github.com/getsentry/self-hosted/blob/master/docker-...

Personally I found Apache Skywalking to be something that you can setup without too many issues https://skywalking.apache.org/ but it's not exactly ideal either.

I wonder what other good options are out there, something that you can have up and running on a 5$ VPS within an hour or two, to not cause friction.

Of course, when SaaS is an option, many will just go for that.

Apache SkyWalking is an open-source APM tool meant for distributed systems. It has support for distributed tracing, agents in multiple languages, and support for an eBPF agent.

Are you working on microservices, cloud native, and container-based architectures? Then you need to check out Apache Skywalking. It's an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) system, that provides monitoring, tracing, and diagnosing capabilities for distributed systems in Cloud Native architectures. This latest update has hundreds of changes including support for Java 21 runtime, new functions and parameters, the addition of Golang as a supported language for AMQP, Kafka, RocketMQ, and Pulsar, support for multiple labels in metrics, and tonnes more. Check out all changes in the very comprehensive release notes. All the Apache Skywalking metrics are available via Grafana.

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.

Apache SkyWalking is an APM tool, focusing on microservices, Cloud Native apps, and Kuernetes architectures. It builds its architecture on four kinds of components: