Open source
Zipkin
The original open-source tracer, still simple and light.
- signals
- Traces
- Metrics
- Logs
- Profiles
- otlp ingest
- via Collector / agent
- storage
- In-memory, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, MySQL
- website
- zipkin.io ↗
Zipkin, inspired by Google’s Dapper paper, is one of the earliest open-source tracing systems. It is lightweight and easy to run; the OpenTelemetry Collector’s Zipkin exporter bridges OTLP data into it.
Best for
Local development and small, simple deployments.
Strengths
- +Very easy to run locally
- +Small, well-understood codebase
- +Wide legacy instrumentation support
Consider
- −Traces only, with a basic UI
- −Less active development than newer tools
Also handles these signals