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Star Glam Gazette

What is zipkin tracing?

Author

William Taylor

Updated on May 26, 2026

Zipkin is a distributed tracing system. It helps gather timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems in service architectures. Applications need to be “instrumented” to report trace data to Zipkin. This usually means configuration of a tracer or instrumentation library.

How does zipkin tracing work?

Zipkin is a Java-based app used for distributed tracing and identifying latency issues. Unique identifiers are automatically attached to requests which are then passed downstream through the different waypoints, or services. Zipkin collects this data and allows users to analyze it in a UI.

What is a distributed trace?

Distributed tracing is the capability for a tracing solution to track and observe service requests as they flow through distributed systems by collecting data as the requests go from one service to another.

What is sleuth and zipkin?

Sleuth is a tool from Spring cloud family. It is used to generate the trace id, span id and add these information to the service calls in the headers and MDC, so that It can be used by tools like Zipkin and ELK etc. to store, index and process log files.

Who uses zipkin?

Who uses Zipkin? 20 companies reportedly use Zipkin in their tech stacks, including deleokorea, Nutmeg, and Medidata Solutions.

What is spring cloud sleuth and zipkin?

Spring Cloud Sleuth is used to generate and attach the trace id, span id to the logs so that these can then be used by tools like Zipkin and ELK for storage and analysis. Zipkin is a distributed tracing system. It helps gather timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems in service architectures.

Who is using zipkin?

AirBnb and Uber are also both using Zipkin. On the commercial side, at least one company, LightStep, offers enterprise support for the technology. And this week, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is mulling over the next project to take under its wing, and Zipkin is under consideration.

What is zipkin in Java?

Zipkin is a Java-based distributed tracing system to collect and look up data from distributed systems. Too many things could happen when a request to an HTTP application is made. A request could include a call to a database engine, to a cache server, or any other dependency like another microservice.

Why is distributed tracing?

Distributed tracing, sometimes called distributed request tracing, is a method to monitor applications built on a microservices architecture. This allows them to pinpoint bottlenecks, bugs, and other issues that impact the application’s performance.

Why is distributed tracing important?

Distributed tracing can provide that perspective. By showing how each request passes through the application, tracing provides the context necessary for developers to understand the connections between cause and effect.

What is zipkin span?

A span is a single-host view of an operation. A trace is a series of spans (often RPC calls) which nest to form a latency tree. Spans are in the same trace when they share the same trace ID.

How do you turn on zipkin in spring boot?

Add the @EnableZipkinServer annotation in your main Spring Boot application class fie. The @EnableZipkinServer annotation is used to enable your application act as a Zipkin server.