Zipkin data source

Grafana ships with built-in support for Zipkin, an open source distributed tracing system. The Zipkin data source lets you query and visualize traces collected by Zipkin directly in Grafana, helping you identify latency bottlenecks, trace requests across microservices, and understand dependencies between services.

{{< admonition type="note" >}} This plugin requires Grafana version 12.3.0 or later. {{< /admonition >}}

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:

• Configure the Zipkin data source
• Zipkin query editor
• Template variables
• Troubleshooting

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

Always ensure that your plugin version is up-to-date so you have access to all current features and improvements. Navigate to Plugins and data > Plugins to check for updates. Grafana recommends upgrading to the latest Grafana version, and this applies to plugins as well.

{{< admonition type="note" >}} Plugins are automatically updated in Grafana Cloud. {{< /admonition >}}

Related resources

• Official Zipkin documentation
• Grafana community forum