Zipkin

An open-source distributed tracing system originally developed at Twitter, inspired by Google's Dapper research paper. Zipkin collects timing data from instrumented services and lets you search, visualize, and diagnose latency in distributed systems — particularly popular in the Java / Spring Boot ecosystem.

What is Zipkin?

Zipkin was open-sourced by Twitter in 2012, making it one of the oldest distributed tracing tools in the ecosystem. It implements the distributed tracing model from Google's Dapper paper: requests are tracked as a tree of spans, each representing a unit of work with a start time, duration, and metadata tags. The full tree of spans forms a trace.

Zipkin uses a push model: instrumented services send completed spans to the Zipkin collector over HTTP. OpenTelemetry supports sending traces to Zipkin via the OTel Collector's Zipkin exporter, making it easy to migrate between backends. Spring Boot 3 includes first-class Zipkin support via Micrometer Tracing — adding two dependencies automatically instruments all HTTP requests, database calls, and messaging operations.

Storage Options

Quick Start (Docker)

# Zipkin all-in-one (in-memory storage — dev/testing)
docker run -d -p 9411:9411 openzipkin/zipkin

# With MySQL storage
docker run -d -p 9411:9411   -e STORAGE_TYPE=mysql   -e MYSQL_HOST=mysql   -e MYSQL_USER=zipkin   -e MYSQL_PASS=zipkin   openzipkin/zipkin

# With Elasticsearch storage
docker run -d -p 9411:9411   -e STORAGE_TYPE=elasticsearch   -e ES_HOSTS=http://elasticsearch:9200   openzipkin/zipkin

# Open UI at http://localhost:9411

Spring Boot 3 Auto-Configuration

# Spring Boot 3 — automatic Zipkin tracing via Micrometer
# pom.xml

  io.micrometer
  micrometer-tracing-bridge-brave


  io.zipkin.reporter2
  zipkin-reporter-brave


# application.properties
management.tracing.sampling.probability=1.0
management.zipkin.tracing.endpoint=http://zipkin:9411/api/v2/spans
spring.application.name=order-service

# That's it — all HTTP requests, DB calls, and messaging are auto-traced

OTel Collector → Zipkin

# otel-collector-config.yaml — export to Zipkin
exporters:
  zipkin:
    endpoint: http://zipkin:9411/api/v2/spans
    format: proto   # or json

service:
  pipelines:
    traces:
      receivers: [otlp]
      processors: [batch]
      exporters: [zipkin]

Zipkin HTTP API v2

# Zipkin HTTP API v2
# POST spans (JSON)
curl -X POST http://zipkin:9411/api/v2/spans   -H "Content-Type: application/json"   -d '[{
    "traceId": "abc123def456",
    "id": "abc123def456",
    "name": "get-order",
    "timestamp": 1711584000000000,
    "duration": 45000,
    "localEndpoint": { "serviceName": "order-service" },
    "tags": { "http.status_code": "200", "order.id": "42" }
  }]'

# GET traces by service
GET /api/v2/traces?serviceName=order-service&limit=20

# GET trace by ID
GET /api/v2/trace/{traceId}

# GET services list
GET /api/v2/services