Apache SkyWalking is a top-level Apache Software Foundation project that provides a complete observability stack for cloud-native and microservice architectures. It combines distributed tracing, metrics collection, log correlation, and service topology visualization in a single platform, eliminating the need to stitch together separate monitoring tools. Agents are available for Java, .NET Core, PHP, Node.js, Go, Lua, Rust, C++, and Python, covering virtually every language used in modern backend development.
The platform uses a pluggable storage layer that supports Elasticsearch, BanyanDB, H2, MySQL, TiDB, and PostgreSQL, allowing teams to leverage their existing database infrastructure. Its analysis engine processes telemetry data to generate service dependency maps, detect anomalies using machine learning, and trigger alerts based on configurable rules. SkyWalking also ingests data from ecosystem standards including OpenTelemetry, Zipkin, Prometheus, and Fluentd, making it a natural aggregation point for heterogeneous monitoring setups.
Hundreds of companies use SkyWalking in production, with clusters handling over 100 billion telemetry data points. The web-based dashboard provides real-time views of service health, endpoint performance, and trace details with drill-down capabilities. For organizations operating Kubernetes-based microservice platforms, SkyWalking offers a mature, battle-tested alternative to commercial APM solutions with the flexibility and transparency that come from a well-governed open-source project.