AWS X-Ray
Trace requests through distributed and serverless apps on AWS.
Kamon
Unified tracing, metrics, and context propagation for JVM applications
Kamon Telemetry provides a comprehensive suite of Scala libraries to collect metrics, propagate trace context, and generate distributed traces for JVM‑based services, simplifying observability across threads and microservices.
Overview
Highlights
Automatic distributed tracing with minimal code changes
Rich metric collection with built‑in reporters
Seamless context propagation across threads and async boundaries
Integrations with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and popular JVM frameworks
Pros
- Native Scala API aligns with functional programming
- Extensive documentation and guides
- Broad ecosystem integrations (OTel, Prometheus, Zipkin)
- Active community with zero open issues
Considerations
- License not explicitly stated (NOASSERTION)
- Primarily Scala‑centric, Java interop may require wrappers
- Configuration can be verbose for large setups
- Requires JVM; not applicable to native or non‑JVM languages
Managed products teams compare with
When teams consider Kamon, 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
- Scala microservices needing end‑to‑end tracing
- JVM applications requiring unified metrics and tracing
- Teams adopting OpenTelemetry standards
- Projects that value community‑driven observability tools
Not ideal when
- Non‑JVM workloads
- Simple scripts with minimal observability needs
- Environments where a permissive license is mandatory
- Teams requiring out‑of‑the‑box UI dashboards
How teams use it
Microservice latency analysis
Identify slow endpoints across services by correlating traces and latency metrics.
Resource usage monitoring
Track CPU, memory, and custom JVM metrics to trigger alerts before saturation.
Cross‑thread request tracing
Maintain trace context through async calls, enabling full request lifecycle visibility.
OpenTelemetry migration
Replace existing instrumentation with Kamon’s OTel bridge for seamless compatibility.
Tech snapshot
Scala88%
Java10%
Vue2%
TypeScript1%
HTML1%
SCSS1%
Frequently asked questions
What programming languages does Kamon support?
Kamon is written in Scala and runs on the JVM, so it works with Scala and any JVM language such as Java or Kotlin.
How does Kamon integrate with OpenTelemetry?
Kamon provides an OpenTelemetry bridge that can export traces and metrics to OTel‑compatible back‑ends, allowing hybrid or full migrations.
Does Kamon include a UI for visualizing traces?
Kamon focuses on data collection; visualizing traces requires external tools like Jaeger, Zipkin, or Grafana.
Can I use Kamon in a pure Java project?
Yes, Java projects can use Kamon, though the API is Scala‑centric and may need small interop wrappers.
What license is Kamon released under?
The repository does not specify a license (NOASSERTION), so you should verify licensing before commercial use.
Project at a glance
Active- Stars
- 1,425
- Watchers
- 1,425
- Forks
- 333
Repo age12 years old
Last commit2 days ago
Primary languageScala
Last synced 4 hours ago