Apache SkyWalking

Apache SkyWalking is an observability platform built for cloud-native architectures. It pulls distributed tracing, metrics, logs, profiling, and alerting into a single UI, with auto-instrumentation agents for Java, Go, Python, Node.js, PHP, Rust, Ruby, and .NET. On Kubernetes, it goes deeper via eBPF, reaching the kernel without touching application code.

The platform handles serious scale. A single cluster can process 100 billion telemetry data points, and BanyanDB ships as a native storage backend purpose-built for that volume.

Key capabilities:

• Distributed tracing – span-by-span waterfall views, native format plus Zipkin v1/v2, with cross-service dependency analysis
• Metrics pipeline – OTLP, OpenCensus, Telegraf, Zabbix, and Prometheus all flow through one MAL script pipeline
• Log explorer – trace-correlated log browsing, metric extraction, policy-based sampling, and forwarding
• Profiling – CPU and async profiling bundled in language agents; eBPF-based profiling via Rover on Kubernetes
• GenAI monitoring – latency, traffic, token counts (input and output), and estimated cost per provider and model, making it a practical alternative to dedicated tools like OpenLIT or Arize Phoenix
• Alerting and RBAC – role-based access control with configurable alarm rules

The built-in AI assistant (called Horizon) lets you ask questions about your running system in plain language.