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Self-Hosting Zipkin: Distributed Request Tracing

Zipkin traces requests as they flow through your distributed system. Find bottlenecks, debug latency, and understand service dependencies.

zipkintracingobservabilitymicroservices

What Is Zipkin?


Zipkin is a distributed tracing system. It helps you track requests as they travel through multiple services, finding where latency happens.


How It Works


1. Application sends trace data to Zipkin

2. Zipkin stores and indexes traces

3. UI shows request flow across services

4. Identify slow services and bottlenecks


Features


  • Service dependency graph
  • Trace timeline (waterfall view)
  • Latency analysis
  • Error tracking
  • Annotation search
  • Multiple storage backends (MySQL, Cassandra, Elasticsearch)

    • Zipkin vs Jaeger vs Grafana Tempo


  • Zipkin: Simplest, most mature, Twitter-origin
  • Jaeger: CNCF project, more features, Uber-origin
  • Tempo: Grafana-native, object storage, newest

    • Deployment


    Deploy on TinyPod. Resources: 1 CPU, 512 MB RAM.


    Zipkin is essential once you have multiple services communicating. It turns 'something is slow' into 'service X takes 200ms for this query.'