Zipkin

Development on Zipkin has continued apace, and since the middle of 2015 it has moved to the openzipkin/zipkin organization at GitHub. There are now bindings for Python, Go, Java, Ruby, Scala and C#; and there are Docker images available for those wanting to get started quickly. We still like this tool. There is an active and growing community around usage of it, and implementation is getting easier. If you need a way of measuring the end-to-end latency of many logical requests, Zipkin continues to be a strong choice.

When building distributed applications to address web-scale or big data requirements, setting up appropriate monitoring tools becomes a non-trivial exercise. Zipkin is a tool that instruments the different components of a service-based system and visualizes the breakdown of logical requests passing through multiple services using a ‘firebug-like’ view. The raw data can be stored in Hadoop for more advanced reporting and data mining.