Datadog
Observability platform for metrics, logs, and traces
Apache SkyWalking
Cloud-native APM for distributed tracing and observability
Apache SkyWalking delivers application performance monitoring, distributed tracing, and diagnostics for microservices and cloud-native architectures with multi-language agent support.
Overview
Overview
Apache SkyWalking is an APM system purpose-built for microservices, cloud-native, and container-based architectures. It provides end-to-end distributed tracing, service topology analysis, and comprehensive observability across your entire stack.
Capabilities
SkyWalking supports agents for Java, .NET Core, PHP, NodeJS, Golang, Rust, Python, and more, enabling monitoring across polyglot environments. The platform ingests telemetry from mature ecosystems including OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Zipkin, and Zabbix, processing metrics, traces, and logs through unified pipelines. An eBPF-powered Rover agent profiles Kubernetes deployments for CPU and network diagnostics.
With BanyanDB—a native observability database—SkyWalking scales to handle 100+ billion telemetry data points per cluster. Service-centric alerting, log management pipelines, and AI-powered anomaly detection enhance operational intelligence. Machine learning automatically identifies HTTP URI patterns and calculates metric baselines for intelligent alerting.
Deployment
Designed for production environments requiring deep visibility into distributed systems, SkyWalking supports flexible telemetry forwarding and integrates with Grafana for visualization. Hundreds of organizations rely on it for research, production monitoring, and commercial deployments.
Highlights
Multi-language agents (Java, .NET, Go, Python, Rust, PHP, NodeJS) with active maintenance
Scales to 100+ billion telemetry data points per cluster with native BanyanDB storage
eBPF-powered Rover agent for Kubernetes CPU and network profiling
AI-driven anomaly detection with automatic metric baseline calculation
Pros
- Comprehensive multi-language agent ecosystem for polyglot environments
- Native support for OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Zipkin, and other mature telemetry standards
- Purpose-built observability database (BanyanDB) optimized for APM workloads
- Service-centric alerting with flexible telemetry forwarding to third-party systems
Considerations
- Steeper learning curve compared to simpler APM solutions
- BanyanDB is relatively new (created 2022) with evolving maturity
- Requires infrastructure investment for large-scale deployments
- Java-centric codebase may require JVM expertise for customization
Managed products teams compare with
When teams consider Apache SkyWalking, these hosted platforms usually appear on the same shortlist.
Looking for a hosted option? These are the services engineering teams benchmark against before choosing open source.
Fit guide
Great for
- Organizations running microservices and cloud-native architectures at scale
- Teams needing polyglot monitoring across multiple language runtimes
- Kubernetes environments requiring eBPF-based profiling and diagnostics
- Enterprises consolidating telemetry from OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and legacy systems
Not ideal when
- Small monolithic applications with simple monitoring needs
- Teams seeking fully managed SaaS APM without infrastructure overhead
- Projects requiring immediate production-grade observability database maturity
- Organizations without capacity to manage distributed APM infrastructure
How teams use it
Microservices Performance Troubleshooting
Trace requests across 50+ services to identify latency bottlenecks and optimize critical user journeys in production.
Kubernetes Network Diagnostics
Deploy eBPF Rover agents to profile pod-to-pod network performance and diagnose CPU contention without code instrumentation.
Multi-Vendor Telemetry Consolidation
Unify metrics from Prometheus exporters, OpenTelemetry traces, and Zipkin spans into a single observability platform.
Intelligent Anomaly Detection
Leverage ML-powered baseline calculation to automatically detect traffic spikes and performance degradation with reduced false positives.
Tech snapshot
Java98%
Shell1%
ANTLR1%
Lua1%
FreeMarker1%
Python1%
Frequently asked questions
What languages does SkyWalking support for application instrumentation?
SkyWalking provides actively maintained agents for Java, .NET Core, PHP, NodeJS, Golang, Rust, Python, C++, Lua, and client-side JavaScript.
Can SkyWalking ingest telemetry from existing observability tools?
Yes, it natively supports metrics, traces, and logs from OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Zipkin, Zabbix, Telegraf, and Fluentd through unified pipelines.
What is BanyanDB and why use it over other storage backends?
BanyanDB is SkyWalking's native observability database optimized for APM workloads, designed to efficiently ingest, analyze, and store telemetry data at scale (100+ billion data points per cluster).
Does SkyWalking require code changes to monitor applications?
Language agents typically use auto-instrumentation (e.g., Java agent via JVM flags). The eBPF Rover agent monitors Kubernetes workloads without any code or configuration changes.
How does SkyWalking handle alerting for distributed systems?
It supports service-centric, deployment-centric, and API-centric alarm rules with AI-powered baseline calculation. Alerts and telemetry can be forwarded to third-party systems.
Project at a glance
Active- Stars
- 24,737
- Watchers
- 24,737
- Forks
- 6,643
LicenseApache-2.0
Repo age10 years old
Last commityesterday
Primary languageJava
Last synced 23 hours ago