Apache Zipkin

Apache Zipkin is a distributed tracing system that helps gather timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems in service architectures. It manages both the collection and lookup of tracing data through a collector and query service. Zipkin provides a REST API, web UI, and multiple storage backends (Cassandra, Elasticsearch, MySQL). It supports the B3 propagation format and is compatible with OpenZipkin instrumentation libraries. Originally created at Twitter, it is now maintained as an open-source project.

Apache Zipkin publishes 4 API contracts indexed on the APIs.io network, including Autocomplete API, Services API, Spans API, and 1 more. Tagged areas include Distributed Tracing, Microservices, Monitoring, Observability, and Open Source.

The Apache Zipkin catalog on APIs.io includes 1 Spectral governance ruleset.

Apache Zipkin’s developer surface includes documentation, developer portal, getting-started guide, release notes, support, and 14 more developer resources.

🌐 Visit website 📡 Profile data on GitHub

37.2/100 thin ▬ flat Agent 17/100 agent aware open core · Apache-2.0 Full breakdown ↓
scored 2026-11-06 · rubric v0.27.0 · Show this score on your site →

AccessFreemium

1 published contract 6 Features 4 Use Cases

Distributed Tracing Microservices Monitoring Observability Open Source

What this lets a business do 1

Business capabilities this provider's published APIs can perform, derived from its own contracts. Browse all capabilities →

SaaS Platform Operations Management

BC-4220

ServicesSpansTraces

GET /traces POST /spans GET /dependencies

Kin Score

Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-11-06 · rubric v0.27.0

Composite quality — 37.2/100 · thin

Contract Quality 6.3 / 16

Developer Ergonomics 5.0 / 13

Access Clarity 2.4 / 13

Operational Transparency 3.3 / 8

Contract Governance 1.1 / 8

Discoverability 3.7 / 7

Regulatory Posture 1.5 / 15

Open Source Surface 8.5 / 10

Create-or-Update Ergonomics 0.0 / 10

Agent readiness — 17/100 · agent aware

Machine-Readable Contract 18 / 18

Agentic Access Contract 10 / 10

Documented Reversibility 0 / 6

MCP Server 0 / 12

Machine-Readable Auth 0 / 10

Idempotency 0 / 9

Stable Error Semantics 0 / 8

Request/Response Examples 0 / 7

Rate-Limit Signaling 7 / 7

Typed Event Surface 0 / 6

Agent Skills 0 / 5

Well-Known Catalog 0 / 4

Consent & Bot Identity 0 / 3

A2A Agent Card 0 / 8

Dry-Run / Simulate Mode 0 / 4

Delegated User Identity 0 / 6

Protected Resource Metadata 0 / 5

Registration Without a Human 0 / 6

Agentic Commerce Well-Known Document 0 / 5

Pagination 0 / 5

Distinct Operations 3 / 3

MCP Tool Quality 6 / 6

Regulatory Posture applies to this provider. Its tags matched the Horizontal (data, software, accessibility, platform) regime, so Regulatory Posture carries 15 points of the composite. If this regime is wrong for your business, say so on your provider repo — the applicability map is public and we will correct it.

Open Source Surface applies to this provider. This product is open source and we read its repository directly, so Open Source Surface carries 10 points of the composite. It is scored from what the repository actually publishes — a security policy, a contribution guide, a release history, a code of conduct — read live from the provider rather than inferred from our own catalog pointers. This facet adds; nothing was taken away to make room for it. An open-source project is not excused from the commercial facets, because exemption would strip it of the points it does earn. If we have the wrong repository, or this product is not open source, say so on your provider repo and we will drop the facet rather than have you publish against it.

Create-or-Update Ergonomics applies to this provider. This API accepts writes, so it carries 10 points of the composite. It is scored from the published contracts themselves: whether a caller can create-or-update in one call, whether the write accepts a key the caller already holds, and whether the response says which branch ran. Without that, every write needs a search-and-branch in front of it, and the first time that check is skipped a duplicate record is created. Scored against the observed mean rather than raw — a provider at the catalog average is unchanged by this facet, not penalised by it.

The six quality facets above are damped to 65 points between them, because both conditional facets apply and carry 35 points together. That is why each facet's contribution is shown against a damped maximum: raising a quality facet moves the composite by 65% of its nominal weight, not 100%. The full arithmetic is at apis.io/rating/.

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Agent readiness — checks not met, largest first (exact, from this profile):

MCP Server +12 pts — deployment.mode + probe verdict on the mcp/ manifest, not the pointer; an unprobed slug falls back to authorship
Machine-Readable Auth +10 pts — a served openid-configuration/oauth-authorization-server carrying `issuer` (served), else the securitySchemes class in the provider OpenAPIs — bound (mutualTLS, DPoP, Signature) > negotiable (oauth2 authorizationCode/clientCredentials, openIdConnect) > bearer (http bearer, apiKey)
Idempotency +9 pts — OpenAPI mutating operations declare an idempotency key — a header, a request-body property, or a named de-duplication token whose own description says so (verified); else common[].type matches /idempoten/i (documented)
Stable Error Semantics +8 pts — OpenAPI $refs a shared error schema across 4xx/5xx responses (verified), else common[].type includes ErrorCatalog / ErrorCodes / DeclineCodes
A2A Agent Card +8 pts — a2a/-a2a.yml manifest, graded on conformance.grade against A2A 1.0.0
Request/Response Examples +7 pts — share of operations carrying request/response examples; else an Examples / Code Samples link

11 more unmet checks in the Agent Readiness table above.

Kin Score — facets with the most composite points still available (weight × headroom):

Access Clarity scores 18.4 — up to +16.3 composite points
Contract Quality scores 39.0 — up to +15.3 composite points
Developer Ergonomics scores 38.1 — up to +12.4 composite points

Each check links to what satisfies it. Publish the artifact, or tell us where it already lives, and the score moves on the next scoring run.

Improve this rating by publishing the missing artifacts — every area above can be raised, and the full rubric is at apis.io/rating/. Every facet and dimension name above is a link: it opens that measurement's own page — what it means, the exact checks that feed it, how the whole catalog distributes on it, and the providers at the top of it. This rating is computed from the provider profile at artifacts.apis.io/apache-zipkin/apis.yml: open an issue on github.com/api-evangelist/apache-zipkin to ask a question or point us at an artifact you publish. Submit an artifact on GitHub — free → Manage your own listing — the Influence plan, $499/mo →

Standards implemented 1

Standards this provider implements or carries. De facto ones are profiled and measured by the API Commons; formal ones come from the standards directory and are linked by the provider's own tags. The evidence column says how each claim was established — not that it was made.

OpenAPI

measured — observed by APIs.io (published)

APIs 4

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

Apache Zipkin Autocomplete API

Tag key/value autocompletion

Apache Zipkin Services API

Service discovery and dependency links

Apache Zipkin Spans API

Ingest spans and query span names

Apache Zipkin Traces API

Query trace data

Open Collections 5

Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).

Zipkin autocomplete API

OPEN COLLECTION

Zipkin autocomplete services API

OPEN COLLECTION

Zipkin autocomplete spans API

OPEN COLLECTION

Zipkin autocomplete traces API

OPEN COLLECTION

Zipkin API

OPEN COLLECTION

Apache Zipkin API pricing

Not yet checked against Apache Zipkin's own pricing page. Compiled by API Evangelist on 2026-05-04; confirm before you rely on a figure. A free plan or tier is listed.

Plan	Price
Free freemium	Free
Professional paid	Free
Enterprise enterprise	—

Plan details, limits and sources →

Rate limits

Free Tier Default: 10 requests per minute
Free Tier Monthly Quota: 1000 requests per month
Professional Tier Default: 100 requests per minute

Compiled by API Evangelist, not yet checked against Apache Zipkin's documentation. All 5 limits →

Pricing Plans 1

Published pricing tiers and plan structures.

Apache Zipkin Plans Pricing

3 plans

PLANS

Rate Limits 1

Documented rate limits and quota policies.

Apache Zipkin Rate Limits

5 limits

RATE LIMITS

Service Levels 1

Uptime the provider promises or reports, as SLA4OAI. Read from its own pages; APIs.io runs no monitors.

Apache Zipkin

SLA

FinOps 1

Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.

Apache Zipkin Finops

FINOPS

Features 6

Notable capabilities this provider offers.

Distributed Trace Collection

Collect timing and metadata for distributed service calls with B3 propagation headers.

Trace Query and Visualization

Web UI and REST API for searching and visualizing distributed traces with latency analysis.

Service Dependency Graph

Automatic service call graph generation from collected trace data.

Multiple Storage Backends

Cassandra, Elasticsearch, and MySQL storage backends for different scale requirements.

OpenTelemetry Compatible

Accepts OTLP/Zipkin spans from OpenTelemetry instrumented services.

B3 Propagation

Standard B3 trace propagation headers for distributed context passing across services.

Spectral Rules 1

Spectral governance rulesets for linting and validating these APIs.

Apache Zipkin API Rules

49 rules · 47 errors 1 warnings 1 info

SPECTRAL

Security Posture 1

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Apache Zipkin Domain Security

TLSv1.3

SECURITY

Agentic Access 1

Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.

Apache Zipkin Agentic Access

9 operations · 1 acting

AGENTIC

Use Cases 4

What developers build with this provider.

Microservices Latency Troubleshooting

Identify bottlenecks and slow service calls in distributed architectures.

Service Dependency Mapping

Automatically discover and visualize service-to-service call graphs.

Performance Regression Detection

Compare trace data before and after deployments to detect performance regressions.

Root Cause Analysis

Follow distributed call chains to identify the root cause of errors and failures.

Integrations 6

Pre-built integrations with other platforms and tools.

Spring Cloud Sleuth

Spring Boot auto-instrumentation for trace propagation and Zipkin reporting.

Brave

Java instrumentation library (Brave) for adding Zipkin tracing to Java applications.

Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch storage backend for scalable trace data storage and search.

Apache Cassandra

Cassandra storage backend for high-volume trace data.

OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry Zipkin exporter for reporting OTLP traces to Zipkin.

Kafka

Kafka collector for ingesting spans from high-throughput microservice architectures.

Resources

Get Started 2

Portal, sign-up, and the first successful call

Portal

Portal

GettingStarted

GettingStarted

Documentation 2

Reference material describing how the API behaves

ContributionGuide

ContributionGuide

Documentation

Documentation

Agent Surfaces 1

MCP servers, agent skills, and machine-readable catalogs

AgenticAccess

AgenticAccess

Build 3

SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with

GitHubRepository

GitHubRepository

Python SDK

SDKs

Java SDK

SDKs

Access & Security 2

Authentication, authorization, and security posture

SecurityPolicy

SecurityPolicy

DomainSecurity

DomainSecurity

Operate 4

Status, limits, changes, and where to get help

RateLimits

IssueTracker

ReleaseNotes

Support

Commercial 4

Pricing, plans, and the legal terms of use

Plans

FinOps

License

TermsOfService

Other 1

Properties that don't map to a standard resource type

CapabilityMap

CapabilityMap

Source (apis.yml)

aid: apache-zipkin
name: Apache Zipkin
description: Apache Zipkin is a distributed tracing system that helps gather timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems
  in service architectures. It manages both the collection and lookup of tracing data through a collector and query service.
  Zipkin provides a REST API, web UI, and multiple storage backends (Cassandra, Elasticsearch, MySQL). It supports the B3
  propagation format and is compatible with OpenZipkin instrumentation libraries. Originally created at Twitter, it is now
  maintained as an open-source project.
type: Index
deliveryModel:
  model: open-core
  license: Apache-2.0
  open_source: true
  commercial: true
  callable_host: false
  label: Open core · an OSS project plus a commercial hosted product
  confidence: high
  source:
  - license
  - openapi
  - pricing
  generated: '2026-08-28'
  method: derived
accessModel:
  pricing: freemium
  onboarding: unknown
  trial: false
  try_now: false
  public: false
  label: Freemium
  confidence: low
  source:
  - plans
  - security
  generated: '2026-11-06'
  method: derived
position: Consuming
access: 3rd-Party
image: https://kinlane-images.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/apis-json/icons/apache-zipkin.png
tags:
- Distributed Tracing
- Microservices
- Monitoring
- Observability
- Open Source
tags_raw:
- Distributed Tracing
- Microservices
- Monitoring
- Observability
- Open Source
- Open-Source
created: '2026-03-16'
modified: '2026-04-19'
url: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/api-evangelist/apache-zipkin/refs/heads/main/apis.yml
specificationVersion: '0.23'
apis:
- aid: apache-zipkin:apache-zipkin-autocomplete-api
  name: Apache Zipkin Autocomplete API
  description: Tag key/value autocompletion
  humanURL: https://zipkin.io/zipkin-api/
  tags:
  - Autocomplete
  tags_raw:
  - autocomplete
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/apache-zipkin-autocomplete-api-openapi.yml
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://zipkin.io/zipkin-api/
- aid: apache-zipkin:apache-zipkin-services-api
  name: Apache Zipkin Services API
  description: Service discovery and dependency links
  humanURL: https://zipkin.io/zipkin-api/
  tags:
  - Services
  tags_raw:
  - services
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/apache-zipkin-services-api-openapi.yml
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://zipkin.io/zipkin-api/
- aid: apache-zipkin:apache-zipkin-spans-api
  name: Apache Zipkin Spans API
  description: Ingest spans and query span names
  humanURL: https://zipkin.io/zipkin-api/
  tags:
  - Spans
  tags_raw:
  - spans
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/apache-zipkin-spans-api-openapi.yml
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://zipkin.io/zipkin-api/
- aid: apache-zipkin:apache-zipkin-traces-api
  name: Apache Zipkin Traces API
  description: Query trace data
  humanURL: https://zipkin.io/zipkin-api/
  tags:
  - Traces
  tags_raw:
  - traces
  properties:
  - type: OpenAPI
    url: openapi/apache-zipkin-traces-api-openapi.yml
  - type: Documentation
    url: https://zipkin.io/zipkin-api/
common:
- type: Plans
  url: plans/apache-zipkin-plans-pricing.yml
- type: RateLimits
  url: rate-limits/apache-zipkin-rate-limits.yml
- type: FinOps
  url: finops/apache-zipkin-finops.yml
- type: CapabilityMap
  url: capabilities/apache-zipkin-capability-edges.yml
  name: Apache Zipkin Business Capability Map
- type: IssueTracker
  url: https://github.com/openzipkin/zipkin/issues
- type: SecurityPolicy
  url: https://github.com/openzipkin/zipkin/blob/master/SECURITY.md
- type: ContributionGuide
  url: https://github.com/openzipkin/zipkin/blob/master/.github/CONTRIBUTING.md
- type: License
  name: Apache-2.0
  url: https://github.com/openzipkin/zipkin/blob/master/LICENSE
- type: AgenticAccess
  url: agentic-access/apache-zipkin-agentic-access.yml
- type: DomainSecurity
  url: security/apache-zipkin-domain-security.yml
- type: GitHubRepository
  url: https://github.com/openzipkin/zipkin
- type: Documentation
  url: https://zipkin.io/pages/documentation.html
- type: Portal
  url: https://zipkin.io/
- type: GettingStarted
  url: https://zipkin.io/pages/quickstart.html
- type: ReleaseNotes
  url: https://github.com/openzipkin/zipkin/releases
- type: Support
  url: https://gitter.im/openzipkin/zipkin
- type: TermsOfService
  url: https://www.apache.org/licenses/
- type: SDKs
  url: https://pypi.org/project/py_zipkin/
  title: Python SDK
- type: SDKs
  url: https://search.maven.org/search?q=io.zipkin
  title: Java SDK
- type: Features
  data:
  - name: Distributed Trace Collection
    description: Collect timing and metadata for distributed service calls with B3 propagation headers.
  - name: Trace Query and Visualization
    description: Web UI and REST API for searching and visualizing distributed traces with latency analysis.
  - name: Service Dependency Graph
    description: Automatic service call graph generation from collected trace data.
  - name: Multiple Storage Backends
    description: Cassandra, Elasticsearch, and MySQL storage backends for different scale requirements.
  - name: OpenTelemetry Compatible
    description: Accepts OTLP/Zipkin spans from OpenTelemetry instrumented services.
  - name: B3 Propagation
    description: Standard B3 trace propagation headers for distributed context passing across services.
- type: UseCases
  data:
  - name: Microservices Latency Troubleshooting
    description: Identify bottlenecks and slow service calls in distributed architectures.
  - name: Service Dependency Mapping
    description: Automatically discover and visualize service-to-service call graphs.
  - name: Performance Regression Detection
    description: Compare trace data before and after deployments to detect performance regressions.
  - name: Root Cause Analysis
    description: Follow distributed call chains to identify the root cause of errors and failures.
- type: Integrations
  data:
  - name: Spring Cloud Sleuth
    description: Spring Boot auto-instrumentation for trace propagation and Zipkin reporting.
  - name: Brave
    description: Java instrumentation library (Brave) for adding Zipkin tracing to Java applications.
  - name: Elasticsearch
    description: Elasticsearch storage backend for scalable trace data storage and search.
  - name: Apache Cassandra
    description: Cassandra storage backend for high-volume trace data.
  - name: OpenTelemetry
    description: OpenTelemetry Zipkin exporter for reporting OTLP traces to Zipkin.
  - name: Kafka
    description: Kafka collector for ingesting spans from high-throughput microservice architectures.
maintainers:
- FN: Kin Lane
  email: info@apievangelist.com

Apache Zipkin API — frequently asked questions

Does Apache Zipkin have an API?

Yes. APIs.io lists 4 APIs from Apache Zipkin, including Apache Zipkin Autocomplete API, Apache Zipkin Services API and Apache Zipkin Spans API, and 1 more.

Is there an OpenAPI specification for the Apache Zipkin API?

Yes. APIs.io indexes 4 OpenAPI specifications for Apache Zipkin, each linked for download from this page.

How much does the Apache Zipkin API cost?

APIs.io lists 3 pricing plans for Apache Zipkin, with each plan's price, limits and inclusions under Pricing on this page.

Is the Apache Zipkin API ready for AI agents?

Apache Zipkin has a Kin Score of 37.2 out of 100 (thin) and an Agent Readiness score of 16.6 (agent-aware), scored by API Evangelist on 2026-11-06.

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