openzipkin/brave

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2405 stars · 714 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Brave is a dependency-free Java distributed tracing library that instruments production services to gather timing data, propagate trace contexts, and report spans to Zipkin or compatible backends. It ships ready-made instrumentation for common components like Servlet, Spring, and log correlation with SLF4J/Log4J.

Use cases

• trace requests across microservices in java
• propagate trace context between services
• add trace ids to application logs
• instrument spring web mvc with distributed tracing
• send spans to zipkin backend
• trace legacy java 6 applications without adding dependencies

When to choose

• you run Java/JVM services and want Zipkin-compatible distributed tracing
• you need a tracer with zero third-party dependencies and a tiny footprint
• you want prebuilt instrumentation for Servlet, Spring, or log correlation
• you must trace legacy applications on old JREs

When to avoid

• your stack is not on the JVM
• you have standardized on OpenTelemetry and want vendor-neutral APIs
• you need tracing features outside what Brave's instrumentation covers and would have to write it all yourself

Facets

library · maturity stable

tracing monitoring middleware logging microservices monitoring developer-tools backend jvm cross-platform zipkin distributed-tracing instrumentation x-b3 opentelemetry-alternative microservices

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