Alternatives to Zipkin logo

Alternatives to Zipkin

Jaeger, OpenTracing, New Relic, AppDynamics, and Prometheus are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Zipkin.
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What is Zipkin and what are its top alternatives?

Zipkin is an open-source distributed tracing system that helps in collecting, analyzing, and visualizing latency data in microservices architecture. It provides features like context propagation, sampling, and data aggregation. However, Zipkin can be challenging to set up and maintain, especially in complex environments.

  1. Jaeger: Jaeger is a popular open-source end-to-end distributed tracing system. It supports multiple languages and integrations with various platforms like Kubernetes and Prometheus. Pros: Easy to set up, supports high throughput. Cons: More resource-intensive compared to Zipkin.
  2. OpenTracing: OpenTracing is a vendor-neutral API for distributed tracing that can be integrated with various tracing systems, including Zipkin and Jaeger. Pros: Language-agnostic, promotes interoperability. Cons: Less feature-rich than dedicated tracing systems.
  3. SkyWalking: Apache SkyWalking is an APM (Application Performance Monitoring) tool with distributed tracing capabilities. It can provide insights into service mesh, message queues, and more. Pros: Rich feature set, supports multiple protocols. Cons: Steeper learning curve than Zipkin.
  4. AppDynamics: AppDynamics is a commercial APM platform that includes distributed tracing functionality. It offers advanced monitoring and profiling features suitable for enterprise environments. Pros: Comprehensive monitoring capabilities, user-friendly interface. Cons: Costly compared to open-source options like Zipkin.
  5. Instana: Instana is an APM tool that supports distributed tracing along with application performance monitoring. It offers automatic discovery of services and dependencies. Pros: Real-time insights, automatic instrumentation. Cons: Limited customizability compared to Zipkin.
  6. New Relic: New Relic is a cloud-based APM and monitoring platform that includes distributed tracing capabilities. It provides end-to-end visibility into applications, infrastructure, and customer experiences. Pros: User-friendly interface, scalable architecture. Cons: Relies on cloud infrastructure, may have cost implications.
  7. Honeycomb: Honeycomb is a observability platform that includes distributed tracing as one of its features. It focuses on high-cardinality data analysis and provides powerful query capabilities. Pros: Powerful debugging tools, rich data visualization. Cons: More suitable for advanced users, may require some learning curve.
  8. Dynatrace: Dynatrace is an AI-powered APM platform that offers distributed tracing as part of its observability suite. It provides automatic root cause analysis and anomaly detection. Pros: Intelligent monitoring, comprehensive insights. Cons: High cost, may be overkill for smaller environments.
  9. Grafana: Grafana is an open-source observability platform that can be extended with plugins for distributed tracing, including support for Zipkin and Jaeger. Pros: Customizable dashboards, integrations with various data sources. Cons: Requires additional setup and configuration for tracing functionality.
  10. DataDog: DataDog is a cloud-based monitoring platform that includes distributed tracing functionality. It offers easy integration with various services and provides insights into performance bottlenecks. Pros: Seamless integrations, scalable architecture. Cons: Cost may vary based on usage, may not be cost-effective for small-scale deployments.

Top Alternatives to Zipkin

  • Jaeger
    Jaeger

    Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing System

  • OpenTracing
    OpenTracing

    Consistent, expressive, vendor-neutral APIs for distributed tracing and context propagation. ...

  • New Relic
    New Relic

    The world’s best software and DevOps teams rely on New Relic to move faster, make better decisions and create best-in-class digital experiences. If you run software, you need to run New Relic. More than 50% of the Fortune 100 do too. ...

  • AppDynamics
    AppDynamics

    AppDynamics develops application performance management (APM) solutions that deliver problem resolution for highly distributed applications through transaction flow monitoring and deep diagnostics. ...

  • Prometheus
    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. ...

  • Splunk
    Splunk

    It provides the leading platform for Operational Intelligence. Customers use it to search, monitor, analyze and visualize machine data. ...

  • Datadog
    Datadog

    Datadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog! ...

  • AWS X-Ray
    AWS X-Ray

    It helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications, such as those built using a microservices architecture. With this, you can understand how your application and its underlying services are performing to identify and troubleshoot the root cause of performance issues and errors. It provides an end-to-end view of requests as they travel through your application, and shows a map of your application’s underlying components. ...

Zipkin alternatives & related posts

Jaeger logo

Jaeger

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    OpenTracing logo

    OpenTracing

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        New Relic logo

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          Awesome visualization
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          Ease of use
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          Great ui
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          Free tier
        • 80
          Great tool for insights
        • 66
          Heroku Integration
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          Market leader
        • 49
          Peace of mind
        • 21
          Push notifications
        • 20
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        • 17
          Heroku Add-on
        • 16
          Error Detection and Alerting
        • 13
          Multiple language support
        • 11
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        • 9
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          Best of the best, what more can you ask for
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          Cost
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        • 20
          Pricing model doesn't suit microservices
        • 10
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        • 7
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        AppDynamics logo

        AppDynamics

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        Prometheus logo

        Prometheus

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        AWS X-Ray logo

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