Open Source Java Distributed Tracing Tools

Zipkin is a distributed tracing system. It helps gather timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems in service architectures. Features include both the collection and lookup of this data. If you have a trace ID in a log file, you can jump directly to it. Otherwise, you can query based on attributes such as service, operation name, tags and duration. Some interesting data will be summarized for you, such as the percentage of time spent in a service, and whether or not operations failed. The Zipkin UI also presents a Dependency diagram showing how many traced requests went through each application. This can be helpful for identifying aggregate behavior including error paths or calls to deprecated services. Applications need to be “instrumented” to report trace data to Zipkin.