# sofastack/sofa-tracer

SOFATracer is a component for the distributed system call trace. And through a unified traceId logging the logs of various network calls in the invoking link. These logs can be used for quick discovery of faults, service governance, etc.

Repository: https://github.com/sofastack/sofa-tracer
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/sofa-tracer
Language: Java
License: Apache-2.0
License Family: permissive
Topics: sofastack, opentracing, tracer, sofa-tracer, sofa-boot-starter
Last push: 2026-06-07T01:15:33+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 62/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 86, release rhythm 8, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 3033, "days_push": 88, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1127, forks 384 (observed 2026-08-28T04:03:41.430371+00:00)

## What it is
SOFATracer is a Java distributed tracing component based on the OpenTracing specification, part of the SOFAStack ecosystem. It records network calls across an invocation link with a unified traceId via asynchronous disk logging, and can report trace data to Zipkin for visualization.

## Use cases
- trace requests across microservices with a unified traceId
- instrument Spring MVC, RPC, HttpClient, and DataSource calls for tracing
- report distributed trace spans to Zipkin for visualization
- print traceId and spanId in application logs via SLF4J MDC
- write async call summary and statistics logs to disk
- quickly locate faults in a distributed call chain

## When to choose
- you run a Java/Spring microservices architecture and need OpenTracing-based distributed tracing
- you want high-performance asynchronous trace logging to local disk with log rolling and cleanup
- you are already on the SOFAStack ecosystem (SOFABoot, SOFARPC) and want integrated tracing
- you want to visualize traces in Zipkin

## When to avoid
- your stack is not on the JVM
- you need OpenTelemetry-native instrumentation or a vendor-neutral tracing API going forward
- you need a full tracing backend/UI out of the box (SOFATracer relies on Zipkin for visualization)

## Facets
- artifact type: library
- maturity: maintenance
- function: tracing, logging, monitoring, middleware
- domain: microservices, monitoring, developer-tools, backend
- platform: jvm
- tags: opentracing, distributed-tracing, zipkin, traceid, sofa-stack, disruptor, slf4j-mdc, spring

## Member repositories
- sofastack/sofa-tracer (main) score 62

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:03:41.430371+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 2026-08-30T06:38:55.255489+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/sofastack/sofa-tracer (fetched 2026-08-28T04:03:41.430371+00:00, sha 97d85c1d0871)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.