Collections
- Zipkin and Jaeger are distributed tracing systems, designed to collect and store traces of requests as they flow through microservices.
- Micrometer is a metrics collection library, focused on aggregating and exposing metrics (e.g., counters, gauges, histograms) from applications.
- OpenTelemetry is an open-source observability framework that provides a unified way to collect and export telemetry data (metrics, logs, traces) from applications.
Visualization
- Zipkin and Jaeger provide web-based UIs for visualizing traces, allowing developers to explore and debug complex issues.
- Micrometer does not have a built-in visualization component, but its metrics can be exported to various visualization tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana).
- OpenTelemetry provides a pluggable architecture for visualization, allowing users to choose from various visualization tools (e.g., Grafana, Prometheus, ELK Stack).
Analytics
- Zipkin and Jaeger offer basic analytics capabilities, such as filtering, grouping, and aggregating traces.
- Micrometer provides basic analytics for metrics, including aggregation and filtering.
- OpenTelemetry offers more advanced analytics capabilities, including filtering, grouping, aggregating, and transforming telemetry data.
Data Points Collected
- Zipkin and Jaeger collect trace data, including request IDs, span IDs, timestamps, and annotations.
- Micrometer collects metrics data, including counters, gauges, histograms, and summaries.
- OpenTelemetry collects telemetry data, including metrics, logs, and traces.
Metrics
- Micrometer is focused on metrics collection and provides a wide range of metric types (e.g., counters, gauges, histograms).
- Zipkin and Jaeger do not primarily collect metrics, but can be used to collect and visualize metrics as part of their tracing capabilities.
- OpenTelemetry provides a unified way to collect and export metrics, logs, and traces.
Logs
- Zipkin and Jaeger do not primarily collect logs, but can be used to collect and visualize log data as part of their tracing capabilities.
- Micrometer does not collect logs.
- OpenTelemetry provides a unified way to collect and export logs, metrics, and traces.
Traces
- Zipkin and Jaeger are designed to collect and store traces of requests as they flow through microservices.
- Micrometer does not collect traces.
- OpenTelemetry provides a unified way to collect and export logs, metrics, and traces.
Example Scenario
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Distributed Tracing with Zipkin and Jaeger:
- Request Flow: A customer places an order, triggering a request to the Order Service.
- Span 1: The Order Service creates a span to retrieve product information from the Product Service.
- Span 2: The Product Service creates a span to query the database.
- Span 3: The Payment Service creates a span to process the payment.
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Unified Observability with OpenTelemetry:
- Metrics: OpenTelemetry collects metrics on request latency, error rates, and throughput for each microservice.
- Logs: OpenTelemetry collects logs from each microservice, providing insights into errors and events.
- Traces: OpenTelemetry collects tracing data to understand the request flow.
Key Differences
- Scope: Zipkin and Jaeger focus on distributed tracing, while OpenTelemetry provides unified observability. Micrometer is for metric collection.
- Insights: Zipkin and Jaeger provide tracing insights, while OpenTelemetry provides insights into performance and events. Micrometer focuses on metrics aggregation.
Architecture
- Instrument microservices with OpenTelemetry SDKs (e.g., Java, Python, Go).
- Use OpenTelemetry exporters to send telemetry data to a centralized observability platform (e.g., Prometheus, Jaeger, ELK Stack).
- Use visualization tools (e.g., Grafana, Kibana) to create dashboards and gain insights into system behavior.
- Use alerting tools (e.g., Alertmanager, PagerDuty) to receive notifications when system behavior deviates from expected norms.