A SpanReceiver is responsible for collecting spans from services, converting them to a Zipkin common Span, and passing them to the storage layer. This approach is modular which allows for receivers that accept any type of data from any producer. Zipkin comes with a receiver for Scribe and one for Kafka.
For small architectures, tracers can be setup to send directly to the Zipkin collectors. The ScribeSpanReceiver expects a Scribe log entry with a Base64-encoded, binary serialized thrift Span using the “zipkin” category. This category is configurable via a command line flag. Finagle-Zipkin does this automatically.