SkyWalking: an open source observability platform used to collect, analyze, aggregate and visualize data from services and cloud native infrastructures. SkyWalking provides an easy way to maintain a clear view of your distributed systems, even across Clouds. It is a modern APM, specially designed for cloud native, container based distributed systems.
SkyWalking provides solutions for observing and monitoring distributed systems, in many different scenarios. First of all, like traditional approaches, SkyWalking provides auto instrument agents for services, such as Java, C#, Node.js, Go, PHP and Nginx LUA. (with calls out for Python and C++ SDK contributions). In multilanguage, continuously deployed environments, cloud native infrastructures grow more powerful but also more complex. SkyWalking's service mesh receiver allows SkyWalking to receive telemetry data from service mesh frameworks such as Istio/Envoy and Linkerd, allowing users to understanding the entire distributed system.
SkyWalking provides observability capabilities for service(s), service instance(s), endpoint(s). The terms Service, Instance and Endpoint are used everywhere today, so it is worth defining their specific meanings in the context of SkyWalking:
pods
in Kubernetes, it doesn't need to be a single OS process, however, if you are using instrument agents, an instance is actually a real OS process.SkyWalking allows users to understand the topology relationship between Services and Endpoints, to view the metrics of every Service/Service Instance/Endpoint and to set alarm rules.
In addition, you can integrate
SkyWalking is logically split into four parts: Probes, Platform backend, Storage and UI.