On December 27, Google Cloud Platform announced that Stackdriver Trace (Trace), its tool for analyzing application latency and performance, now supports limited interoperability with Zipkin, a distributed tracing system open-sourced by Twitter in 2012. Trace can now receive traces regarding application performance from Zipkin as a result of Google’s recent release of a Zipkin server. Trace’s ability to receive traces from customers using Zipkin enables customers to leverage the power of Trace for applications written in languages that Trace currently does not support, as well as in conjunction with Zipkin. Trace currently supports Google App Engine-native applications and features libraries to support applications that run on VMs or containers that are written in Node.js, Java and Go. Trace plans to support Ruby and .NET in the near future and, as such, its ability to receive traces from Zipkin via the newly released Zipkin server expands the universe of applications whose latency and performance it can analyze and also allows users to compare the relative merits of Trace and Zipkin. Trace’s ability to accept traces from Zipkin marks a notable step forward in the space of technologies dedicated to understanding application latency and the root causes of performance degradation given that Salesforce and Yelp support Zipkin, alongside Twitter. Expect Google to continue augmenting Trace as it gains even more traction from Zipkin-users and conversely, for Zipkin to evolve as a result of the insights delivered through its compatibility with Stackdriver Trace.
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