Open source tracing projects
Every project in the registry tagged tracing, ranked by real GitHub adoption.
CNCF Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing Platform
Zipkin is a distributed tracing system
APM, (Application Performance Management) tool for large-scale distributed systems.
A powerful framework for faster, easier, and more efficient project development.
Real-time observability for modern web applications
Application level tracing for Rust.
OpenTelemetry Go API and SDK
magic-trace collects and displays high-resolution traces of what a process is doing
Production-safe dynamic tracing and diagnostics for Java applications—attach to live JVMs with no restart or recompilation.
Hubble - Network, Service & Security Observability for Kubernetes using eBPF
Monoscope lets you ingest and explore your logs, traces and metrics. We store these in S3 compatible buckets. Query in natural language via LLMs.
Filesystem monitor tool for Linux/Android iOS/macOS
The OpenTelemetry PHP Library
OpenTelemetry Compile-Time Instrumentation for Golang
open source agent engineering platform: traces, evals, and metrics to debug and improve your AI agents. Integrates with LangGraph, CrewAI, Claude Agent SDK, and
Extremely fast tracing library for Rust
Datadog APM client for Java
OpenMessaging Runtime Interface for Java
The All-in-One System Profiling and Fault Detection Tool for Linux & Android
A development-oriented visualization toolkit
Automatic compile-time instrumentation of Go code
Web-based tool to facilitate OpenTelemetry collector configuration editing and verification
.NET Client Library for Datadog APM
μ/log is a micro-logging library that logs events and data, not words!
Related tags
Frequently asked questions
How many open source tracing projects are there?
This registry tracks 26 projects tagged tracing, with 120,405 GitHub stars between them. The most-adopted is jaeger at 23,366 stars.
Are these tracing projects free to use?
Yes — 25 of the 26 carry an explicit open-source licence across 5 distinct licences, so there is no licence fee. Where a project also sells a hosted or enterprise version, the self-hosted path remains free.
Which tracing project should I choose?
The list above is ranked by GitHub stars, but stars measure attention rather than fit. Check three things on each card: the licence (permissive versus copyleft), the language it is written in, and the last-push date — a high-star project that has not been pushed in a year is a liability.
Are these tracing projects still maintained?
23 of the 26 were pushed in the last 90 days, and every card shows its exact last-push date so you can see the rest. Sort your shortlist by that date before committing to a migration.