Zipkin

Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event-streaming platform developed by the Apache Software Foundation. It is used for high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications, and can be deployed on premises, in a cluster, or through a managed service. The official repository contains Java and Scala source code, build tasks, documentation generation, and unit and integration tests.

An open-source distributed tracing backend developed by Grafana Labs. Tempo ingests traces via Jaeger, Zipkin and OpenTelemetry (OTLP), stores trace data in scalable object stores (Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage, MinIO) using a chunk-based, low-index architecture, and exposes query APIs compatible with Jaeger/OTLP with tight integration into Grafana for visualization. It is available under the Apache 2.0 license and can be run self-hosted (Docker, Kubernetes/Helm) or used as a managed service on Grafana Cloud.

OpenTelemetry is an open-source, vendor-neutral observability framework for cloud-native software. It provides APIs, SDKs, automatic-instrumentation agents, and collector services for capturing distributed traces, metrics, logs, and contextual metadata such as baggage. Its context-propagation mechanism correlates telemetry across service boundaries and carries trace identity through an application’s request path, including standard HTTP communication. The OpenTelemetry Collector receives, processes, filters, and routes telemetry to observability backends such as Jaeger, Prometheus, commercial systems, or custom solutions. It supports native SDKs for more than 12 languages and is hosted as a graduated project by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Rootprint is an open-source, self-hosted log and trace explorer that searches indexes stored on S3-compatible object storage or local disk. It accepts logs and traces through OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) Protobuf or HTTP from compatible collectors and agents, then provides severity-aware log search, field discovery, histograms, query autocomplete, saved views, share links, and exports. Its trace view displays per-span timing, attributes, and events, with links between spans and their logs. A service-health dashboard reports request rate, error rate, p95 latency, time-intensive endpoints, outbound dependencies, and failing spans. The application also includes team roles, scoped ingest keys, service accounts, personal API keys, and SSO through Google, GitHub, or OpenID Connect. Rootprint is distributed under the Apache-2.0 license and can be run with Docker Compose. The repository describes it as being under active development and not yet at version 1.0; its API uses Hono and its web interface uses SvelteKit, with Quickwit used in the object-storage-backed search setup.

Superlog is an open-core, self-hosted observability workspace for OpenTelemetry data, developed by Superlog Labs. It ingests traces, logs, and metrics, groups noisy signals into incidents, and provides a local-first interface for investigating production systems. The open-source community edition includes a web app and API, an OTLP intake proxy, worker processes for incident grouping and background jobs, a Postgres schema, ClickHouse-backed telemetry queries, and pluggable agent-runner interfaces with a default runner that records a local incident summary. The repository is licensed under Apache License 2.0; a hosted Superlog Cloud edition is also available with a free tier, pay-as-you-go plan, and monthly credit packs.