OpenTelemetry vs Zipkin

Overview

Zipkin

Stacks199

Followers152

Votes10

GitHub Stars17.3K

Forks3.1K

OpenTelemetry

Stacks204

Followers148

Votes4

OpenTelemetry vs Zipkin: What are the differences?

OpenTelemetry and Zipkin are both open-source distributed tracing systems used for monitoring and profiling applications. Let's explore the key differences between the two.

OpenTelemetry: OpenTelemetry is a vendor-agnostic observability framework that provides a set of APIs, libraries, agents, and instrumentation to capture telemetry data (such as traces, metrics, and logs) from applications. It supports multiple programming languages and allows for flexible deployment options. OpenTelemetry provides a unified and standardized approach for observability, making it easier to integrate with different monitoring and tracing systems.
Zipkin: Zipkin is an open-source distributed tracing system that focuses on providing tools and interfaces specifically for tracing HTTP requests. It has a simple architecture and is often used in microservices architectures to track requests as they traverse the different services. Zipkin is optimized for HTTP-based communication and can provide detailed information about latencies and dependencies in an application.
Data Collection: OpenTelemetry supports automatic instrumentation and distributed tracing out of the box. It provides SDKs and libraries that can be easily integrated into applications for collecting telemetry data. In contrast, Zipkin requires manual instrumentation and configuration to collect tracing data. Developers need to explicitly instrument their code to generate and propagate traces.
Flexibility: OpenTelemetry offers more flexibility in terms of deployment options and integrations. It can be used with different monitoring systems like Prometheus, Grafana, and Jaeger, allowing users to choose the tools that best suit their needs. Zipkin, on the other hand, is more focused on providing an all-in-one tracing solution with limited integration options.
Supported Languages: OpenTelemetry supports multiple programming languages, including Java, Python, Go, and .NET. This allows developers to use OpenTelemetry in a wide range of applications. Zipkin has broader support for programming languages, including Java, Python, Ruby, and JavaScript.
Community Support: OpenTelemetry has a large and active community of contributors and users. It is backed by major organizations like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services, which ensures ongoing development and support. Zipkin also has an active community, but it may have fewer contributors and resources compared to OpenTelemetry.

In summary, OpenTelemetry is a vendor-agnostic observability framework with automatic instrumentation and flexible deployment options, while Zipkin is a focused distributed tracing solution optimized for HTTP-based communication with manual instrumentation and limited integration options.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Detailed Comparison

Zipkin	OpenTelemetry
It helps gather timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems in service architectures. Features include both the collection and lookup of this data.	It provides a single set of APIs, libraries, agents, and collector services to capture distributed traces and metrics from your application. You can analyze them using Prometheus, Jaeger, and other observability tools.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 17.3K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 3.1K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 199	Stacks 204
Followers 152	Followers 148
Votes 10	Votes 4
Pros & Cons
Pros 10 Open Source	Pros 4 OSS

What are some alternatives to Zipkin, OpenTelemetry?

Grafana

Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins.

Kibana

Kibana is an open source (Apache Licensed), browser based analytics and search dashboard for Elasticsearch. Kibana is a snap to setup and start using. Kibana strives to be easy to get started with, while also being flexible and powerful, just like Elasticsearch.

Prometheus

Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true.

Nagios

Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.

Netdata

Netdata collects metrics per second & presents them in low-latency dashboards. It's designed to run on all of your physical & virtual servers, cloud deployments, Kubernetes clusters & edge/IoT devices, to monitor systems, containers & apps

Zabbix

Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.

Sensu

Sensu is the future-proof solution for multi-cloud monitoring at scale. The Sensu monitoring event pipeline empowers businesses to automate their monitoring workflows and gain deep visibility into their multi-cloud environments.

Graphite

Graphite does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand

Lumigo

Lumigo is an observability platform built for developers, unifying distributed tracing with payload data, log management, and real-time metrics to help you deeply understand and troubleshoot your systems.

StatsD

It is a network daemon that runs on the Node.js platform and listens for statistics, like counters and timers, sent over UDP or TCP and sends aggregates to one or more pluggable backend services (e.g., Graphite).

Related Comparisons

OpenTelemetry vs Zipkin: What are the differences?

OpenTelemetry and Zipkin are both open-source distributed tracing systems used for monitoring and profiling applications. Let's explore the key differences between the two.

OpenTelemetry: OpenTelemetry is a vendor-agnostic observability framework that provides a set of APIs, libraries, agents, and instrumentation to capture telemetry data (such as traces, metrics, and logs) from applications. It supports multiple programming languages and allows for flexible deployment options. OpenTelemetry provides a unified and standardized approach for observability, making it easier to integrate with different monitoring and tracing systems.
Zipkin: Zipkin is an open-source distributed tracing system that focuses on providing tools and interfaces specifically for tracing HTTP requests. It has a simple architecture and is often used in microservices architectures to track requests as they traverse the different services. Zipkin is optimized for HTTP-based communication and can provide detailed information about latencies and dependencies in an application.
Data Collection: OpenTelemetry supports automatic instrumentation and distributed tracing out of the box. It provides SDKs and libraries that can be easily integrated into applications for collecting telemetry data. In contrast, Zipkin requires manual instrumentation and configuration to collect tracing data. Developers need to explicitly instrument their code to generate and propagate traces.
Flexibility: OpenTelemetry offers more flexibility in terms of deployment options and integrations. It can be used with different monitoring systems like Prometheus, Grafana, and Jaeger, allowing users to choose the tools that best suit their needs. Zipkin, on the other hand, is more focused on providing an all-in-one tracing solution with limited integration options.
Supported Languages: OpenTelemetry supports multiple programming languages, including Java, Python, Go, and .NET. This allows developers to use OpenTelemetry in a wide range of applications. Zipkin has broader support for programming languages, including Java, Python, Ruby, and JavaScript.
Community Support: OpenTelemetry has a large and active community of contributors and users. It is backed by major organizations like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services, which ensures ongoing development and support. Zipkin also has an active community, but it may have fewer contributors and resources compared to OpenTelemetry.

OpenTelemetry vs Zipkin

Overview