Top 9 Java Tracing Projects

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1. zipkin

   1 43 17,458 6.7 Java

   Zipkin is a distributed tracing system

   

   Project mention: Why Your Logs Are Useless Without Traces | dev.to | 2026-05-22

   Distributed tracing as a discipline is older than most engineers writing about it think. Google's 2010 Dapper paper, by Sigelman and colleagues, is the canonical reference; Twitter open-sourced Zipkin in 2012 as a Dapper-inspired implementation, and Uber open-sourced Jaeger in 2017 on similar lineage. For most of the 2010s, however, the operational reality was vendor-specific: each APM (Datadog, New Relic, AppDynamics, Dynatrace) shipped its own SDK, and instrumenting an application meant choosing a vendor and accepting that the instrumentation work was, structurally, lock-in.

2. AppSignal

   www.appsignal.com sponsored

   AppSignal knows why the f*#k it crashed. Stop vibe-debugging. Every exception, every backtrace, grouped so you see patterns, not noise.

   

3. Pinpoint

   2 2 13,869 9.9 Java

   APM, (Application Performance Management) tool for large-scale distributed systems.

   

4. transmittable-thread-local

   3 1 8,300 2.3 Java

   📌 a missing Java std lib(simple & 0-dependency) for framework/middleware, provide an enhanced InheritableThreadLocal that transmits values between threads even using thread pooling components.

   

5. brave

   4 3 2,406 6.1 Java

   Java distributed tracing implementation compatible with Zipkin backend services.

   

6. Automon

   5 0 571 9.6 Java

   Automon combines the power of AOP (AspectJ) with monitoring or logging tools you already use to declaratively trace and monitor your Java code, the JDK, and 3rd party libraries.

   

7. java-specialagent

   6 1 190 0.0 Java

   Automatic instrumentation for 3rd-party libraries in Java applications with OpenTracing.

   

8. jplusone

   7 1 115 5.5 Java

   Tool for automatic detection and asserting "N+1 SELECT problem" occurences in JPA based Spring Boot Java applications and finding origin of JPA issued SQL statements in general

   

9. Kargo

   akuity.io sponsored

   Stop Scripting Promotions. Start Shipping with Kargo. Kargo automates promotion across dev, staging, and prod with approval gates and verification. Open source, built by the team behind Argo CD. Download now.

   

10. hidden-gems

    8 1 10 0.0 Java

    Code sample for hidden gems (by ammbra)

    

11. learning-distributed-tracing

    9 1 1 6.3 Java

    A comprehensive educational project demonstrating distributed tracing concepts in a microservices architecture using Spring Boot, OpenTelemetry and Jaeger.

    

    Project mention: Distributed Tracing in Spring Boot: A Practical Guide to OpenTelemetry and Jaeger | dev.to | 2026-01-31

    For hands-on examples and complete configuration, check out the learning-distributed-tracing repository.

Java Tracing related posts

• Implementing Distributed Tracing with Spring Boot and Zipkin

  1 project | dev.to | 24 Sep 2024

• Enhancing API Observability Series (Part 3): Tracing

  3 projects | dev.to | 19 Mar 2024

• Show HN: Uptrace – open-source APM (alternative to Datadog, NewRelic)

  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Apr 2023

• Library For Propagating HTTP Headers

  1 project | /r/Kotlin | 28 Mar 2023

• How to debug performance degradation

  2 projects | /r/haskell | 23 Sep 2022

• .NET 6 logging service with free tier

  1 project | /r/dotnet | 15 Aug 2022

• Using OpenTelemetry (OTel) with Fastly

  1 project | /r/fastly | 28 Jun 2022
• A note from our sponsor - Kargo
  akuity.io | 15 Sep 2026

  Kargo automates promotion across dev, staging, and prod with approval gates and verification. Open source, built by the team behind Argo CD. Download now. Learn more →

Index

Sponsored

AppSignal knows why the f*#k it crashed.

Stop vibe-debugging. Every exception, every backtrace, grouped so you see patterns, not noise.

www.appsignal.com

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