openzipkin/zipkin

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

17453 stars · 3102 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Zipkin is a distributed tracing system that collects and stores timing data from instrumented applications to help troubleshoot latency in service architectures. It provides a web UI for querying traces by ID, service, tags, or duration, plus dependency diagrams showing request flow between services.

Use cases

• troubleshoot latency problems in microservices
• find slow requests across a distributed system
• view service dependency diagrams
• look up a trace by trace ID from a log file
• collect spans via HTTP or Kafka
• self-host a tracing backend for OpenTelemetry data

When to choose

• you need a mature, self-contained tracing server with a built-in UI
• you want flexible storage backends like Cassandra or Elasticsearch
• you report spans over HTTP, Kafka, gRPC, or RabbitMQ
• you need a lightweight jar or Docker deployment

When to avoid

• you need metrics and logs alongside traces in one observability platform
• you want a fully managed cloud tracing service
• your environment cannot run Java 17+ or Docker

Facets

service · maturity stable

tracing monitoring http-server search-engine monitoring microservices jvm self-hosted cross-platform distributed-tracing observability latency-troubleshooting opentelemetry-compatible service-dependency-graph devops docker web-server

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