Zipkin data source

When a request slows to a crawl or fails somewhere deep in your microservices, Zipkin shows you exactly where. Zipkin is an open source distributed tracing system that follows a request as it hops from service to service, so you can pinpoint the bottleneck instead of guessing.

The Zipkin data source brings those traces straight into Grafana. Query and visualize them alongside your logs and metrics to find latency bottlenecks, follow requests across services, and map the dependencies between them. Grafana ships with the data source preinstalled, so you can start exploring traces right away.

As of Grafana 13.2, Zipkin is packaged as a standalone plugin so it can receive updates independently of Grafana releases. For details, refer to Plugin updates.

Supported features

Feature	Supported
Traces	Yes
Metrics	No
Logs	No
Alerting	No
Annotations	No

Get started

The following pages help you get started with the Zipkin data source:

Additional features

After configuring the data source, you can:

Use Explore to query traces without building a dashboard
Navigate from traces to related logs with trace to logs integration
Navigate from traces to related metrics with trace to metrics integration
Enable the Node graph visualization to view service dependencies
Add Transformations to manipulate query results

Plugin updates

Starting with Grafana v13.2, the Zipkin data source is a standalone plugin, preinstalled in both Grafana OSS and Enterprise. This enables more frequent updates independent of Grafana releases. Grafana automatically checks the plugin catalog and installs the latest version on each server restart.

To adjust this behavior:

Opt out of auto-updates: Set preinstall_auto_update to false in your configuration file.
Update manually: Update at any time from the Administration > Plugins page without restarting Grafana.

The standalone plugin requires Grafana 12.3.0 or later. The Zipkin data source bundled with Grafana 13.1 and earlier continues to work as before. These versions are unaffected by the externalization.

Users running Grafana 12.3.x through 13.1.x can install the standalone plugin from the plugin catalog if they want the latest features before upgrading to Grafana 13.2. To use the standalone plugin with these versions, add the following to your configuration file:

[plugin.zipkin]
as_external = true

[plugins]
; Install the latest version on startup:
preinstall_sync = zipkin
; Or install a specific version:
; preinstall_sync = zipkin@<version>