# sourcegraph/appdash

Application tracing system for Go, based on Google's Dapper.

Repository: https://github.com/sourcegraph/appdash
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/appdash
Homepage: https://sourcegraph.com
Language: Go
License: NOASSERTION
License Family: other
Archived: true
Last push: 2021-10-28T08:06:29+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 10/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-02T17:46:02.011165+00:00)
- activity 0, release rhythm 35, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 4302, "days_push": 1770, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: no_releases, archived, no_license
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1704, forks 134 (observed 2026-08-28T04:05:24.665270+00:00)

## What it is
Appdash is an application tracing system for Go, based on Google's Dapper and Twitter's Zipkin. It lets you instrument applications to record spans and events for requests and operations, then visualize timings and metadata in a tree/timeline web UI.

## Use cases
- trace end-to-end request handling in a Go application
- debug slow HTTP requests and SQL queries
- visualize a tree and timeline of downstream service calls
- instrument custom operations with application-specific metadata
- collect distributed tracing data in a Dapper/Zipkin style

## When to choose
- you have a Go application and want lightweight, self-hosted distributed tracing
- you want built-in HTTP and SQL tracing recorders with a web UI
- you prefer a Dapper-style span/event model you can extend with custom schemas

## When to avoid
- you need an actively developed tracer with broad ecosystem support (consider OpenTelemetry)
- you need tracing in non-Go languages
- you need vendor-backed APM with alerting and long-term metric storage

## Facets
- artifact type: library
- maturity: maintenance
- function: tracing, monitoring, http-server, middleware
- domain: developer-tools, monitoring, backend, performance
- platform: go, cross-platform
- tags: distributed-tracing, dapper, zipkin, go, observability, apm

## Member repositories
- sourcegraph/appdash (main) score 10

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:05:24.665270+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T03:37:35.926640+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/sourcegraph/appdash (fetched 2026-08-28T04:05:24.665270+00:00, sha 1aff831ee08a)
  - homepage: https://sourcegraph.com (fetched 2026-08-29T11:11:59.357466+00:00, sha 6246d788642a)
  - site_page: https://sourcegraph.com/docs/api (fetched 2026-08-29T11:11:59.369211+00:00, sha 623aae1c35c5)
  - site_page: https://sourcegraph.com/docs/cli (fetched 2026-08-29T11:11:59.371205+00:00, sha ab041a8eda6f)
  - site_page: https://sourcegraph.com/docs (fetched 2026-08-29T11:11:59.375014+00:00, sha 926125f12098)
  - site_page: https://sourcegraph.com/pricing (fetched 2026-08-29T11:11:59.366902+00:00, sha 44df09d4b3a8)
  - site_page: https://sourcegraph.com/changelog (fetched 2026-08-29T11:11:59.372904+00:00, sha 447aea873969)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.