In last few months I looked into Zipkin which is a ‘Distributed Systems Tracing’ framework implementation open sourced by Twitter and implemented based on the Dapper paper published by Google.
While looking into Zipkin I decided to create a Java implementation of the Dapper paper which can integrate with Zipkin so the Zipkin back-end components (mainly data store, query service and web UI) can be reused. My Open Source Java implementation is called Brave.
The Twitter developers added Brave to the Zipkin wiki after which it gained some more popularity… going from 1 star to 28 times starred in less than a week :-)
If you work on a distributed system with lots of services interacting and want to improve observability I advice you to have a look at Dapper / Zipkin / Brave.