Ovum On the Radar
Distributed systems are a particular challenge in performance monitoring, more so with enterprise applications based on microservices and containers. This is because the scale can increase and they are also highly dynamic and transient. Zipkin is an open source project that addresses this challenge with a distributed tracing system for monitoring latency issues. It has been designed with a number of features that make it ideal for microservices. Finding and eliminating abnormal delays to events is crucial in mission-critical production systems. Zipkin gathers the timing data needed to troubleshoot these latency problems and manages both the collection and visualization of the data, enabling operations staff to rapidly pinpoint and fix problems.