Tracing, APM & profiling

OpenTelemetry

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector

Popular

Vendor-neutral standard, SDKs and Collector for traces, metrics and logs; CNCF graduated in 2026.

Jaeger

jaegertracing/jaeger

Popular

CNCF-graduated distributed tracing backend; v2 is rebuilt on top of the OpenTelemetry Collector.

Grafana Tempo

grafana/tempo

Cost-efficient tracing backend that stores traces in object storage and queries them with TraceQL.

SigNoz

SigNoz/signoz

Rising

OpenTelemetry-native APM with traces, metrics and logs on ClickHouse; open-source Datadog alternative.

Honeycomb

honeycomb.io

SaaS observability built for high-cardinality event and trace analysis.

Grafana Pyroscope

grafana/pyroscope

Continuous profiling database for CPU and memory flame graphs across services and releases.

OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation

open-telemetry/opentelemetry-ebpf-instrumentation

New

Zero-code eBPF auto-instrumentation (OBI) emitting traces and RED metrics; donated by Grafana from Beyla.

Coroot

coroot/coroot

Rising

eBPF-based observability with zero-instrumentation service maps, SLOs and automated root-cause analysis.

ClickStack

ClickHouse/ClickStack

New

ClickHouse's open-source observability stack, with the HyperDX UI, for logs, traces, metrics and sessions.

Zipkin

openzipkin/zipkin

Legacy

Early distributed tracing system from Twitter; still around, but most teams now choose Jaeger or Tempo.

Apache SkyWalking

apache/skywalking

APM for distributed systems: tracing, metrics, logs and service topology, with eBPF-based profiling.