In a short time, the open-source ecosystem has evolved from niche projects with limited corporate backing to the de facto way to build software. Today, organizations large and small are adopting open-source software to accelerate product development and innovation. In the government sector, the U.S. Department of Defense issued a memorandum on adopting open source software as its preference versus proprietary software, calling open-source “critical in delivering software faster.”

Open source Zipkin offers a robust set of features that make it easier for developers to understand and optimize complex distributed systems. Distributed tracing is a technique you can use to trace and monitor requests propagating through a distributed system. It can work in environments where multiple services process a request, making it an essential tool for modern microservices architectures. Zipkin is an open source distributed tracing system for monitoring and troubleshooting complex systems.

Compare Graphite and Prometheus, two leading open-source monitoring solutions.