The Importance of Distributed Tracing for Apache-Kafka-Based Applications | Confluent

This post introduces the concept and implementation of distributed tracing for Apache Kafka-based applications using Zipkin. It details how to instrument Kafka clients, Kafka Streams applications, Kafka Connect pipelines, and KSQL to gain visibility into dataflows, analyze latency issues, and debug runtime problems. The article covers the architecture of Zipkin, the use of Kafka interceptors, and provides examples of tracing Kafka Connectors and Kafka Streams applications, demonstrating how to correlate spans across different components to achieve end-to-end visibility.