SkyWalking is a monitoring tool, which collects metrics from a distributed system. In the real world, a very large distributed system includes hundreds of services, thousands of service instances. In that case, most likely, more than one group, even more than one company are maintaining and monitoring the distributed system. Each one of them takes charge of different parts, don‘t want or shouldn’t share there metrics.
Namespace is the proposal from this.It is used for tracing and monitoring isolation.
# The agent namespace # agent.namespace=default-namespace
The default value of agent.namespace is empty.
Influence The default header key of SkyWalking is sw8, more in this document. After agent.namespace is set, the key changes to namespace-sw8.
The across process propagation chain breaks, when the two sides are using different namespace.