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Zipkin

Zipkin is an Apache-2.0 distributed tracing system that gathers timing data to troubleshoot latency problems in service architectures, with a UI for finding and viewing traces.

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Introduction

Zipkin is a distributed tracing system. It helps gather timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems in service architectures, and offers both collection and lookup of that data. It was originally created at Twitter, based on Google’s Dapper paper, and is now maintained by the OpenZipkin community.

The source code is at openzipkin/zipkin on GitHub under the Apache-2.0 licence, with about 17,500 stars; the most recent commit was on 6 August 2026.

Features

  1. Trace collection: HTTP, Kafka and other transports.
  2. Storage options: In-memory, Cassandra, Elasticsearch and MySQL; see docs.
  3. Web UI: Search traces and view dependencies.
  4. Dependency diagram: Visualise service calls.
  5. Wide instrumentation: Libraries for many languages, plus OpenTelemetry compatibility.

Pros

  1. Free to use: Open source under Apache-2.0.
  2. Maintained: Commits as recent as 6 August 2026.
  3. Community: About 17,500 GitHub stars.

Cons

  1. Traces only: Use other tools for metrics and logs.
  2. Slower pace: Last commit August 2026.
docker run -d -p 9411:9411 openzipkin/zipkin

Then open http://localhost:9411.

Resources:

Pricing

Zipkin is free and open source under the Apache-2.0 licence.

  1. Teams already using Zipkin instrumentation.
  2. Developers wanting a simple tracing UI.
  3. Not a fit for all-in-one observability.

Conclusion

Zipkin is a proven, simple distributed tracing backend.

Alternatives

Other tools on CheckOps that cover similar ground. Open a page, or compare one with Zipkin side by side.