Grafana Zipkin data source

The Zipkin data source plugin lets you query and visualize traces from Zipkin — an open source, distributed tracing system — inside Grafana. It ships built-in with Grafana, so most users don't need to install it separately.

Features

• Query traces by ID or interactively drill down through a service → operation → trace selector in Explore.
• Upload a JSON trace file and visualize it without a running Zipkin instance.
• Node graph visualization of a trace's service topology.
• Trace to logs and trace to metrics links to pivot from a span to correlated logs (Loki, Splunk, Elasticsearch) or metrics (Prometheus).
• Span filtering in the trace timeline viewer.
• Links to traces from logs (via derived fields / data links) and from metrics (via exemplars).

Documentation

User-facing documentation — configuration, querying, provisioning, and trace correlation — lives at:

• Zipkin data source documentation

The source for that page is in docs/sources/_index.md.

Installation

The Zipkin data source is included with Grafana by default — no installation required. To add and configure an instance:

1. Go to Connections → Data sources in Grafana.
2. Click Add new data source and select Zipkin.
3. Set the URL of your Zipkin instance (for example, http://localhost:9411).
4. Click Save & test.

You can also provision the data source with YAML. See the provisioning example in the documentation.

Compatibility

This plugin requires Grafana >=12.3.0. See src/plugin.json for the authoritative grafanaDependency.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! See CONTRIBUTING.md for how to set up your environment, build the plugin, run tests, and propose changes. For an overview of the codebase architecture, see DEVELOPMENT.md.

License

This plugin is licensed under the AGPL-3.0 License.