ZIPKIN

Historical Twitter distributed tracing.

Definition

Zipkin v2 (2017) introduces a new JSON model. Components: Collector (Span Receiver), Storage (Cassandra, MySQL, Elasticsearch), Search Engine, Web UI (D3.js). Brave (Java instrumentation library) popular. Zipkin inspired Jaeger ; today both converge around OpenTelemetry.

Origin

Twitter open-sourced Zipkin in June 2012 (ported by Adrian Cole to Java in 2014).

Example in context

A legacy team maintains Spring Boot services with Brave + Zipkin Server since 2017 ; gradual OTel migration.

Related terms

• Jaeger — CNCF successor.