# Apache SkyWalking — Distributed APM & Observability Platform

> Apache-licensed APM platform unifying distributed tracing, metrics, logs, and eBPF profiling for microservices and service meshes.

## Install

Save as a script file and run:

# Apache SkyWalking — Distributed APM & Observability

## Quick Use
```bash
# Standalone demo with in-memory storage
docker run --name skywalking-oap -d -p 11800:11800 -p 12800:12800 
  apache/skywalking-oap-server:latest
docker run --name skywalking-ui -d -p 8080:8080 
  -e SW_OAP_ADDRESS=http://skywalking-oap:12800 
  apache/skywalking-ui:latest
# Attach the Java agent to your service
java -javaagent:/opt/skywalking-agent/skywalking-agent.jar 
  -Dskywalking.collector.backend_service=skywalking-oap:11800 -jar app.jar
```

## Introduction
Apache SkyWalking is a top-level Apache Foundation observability platform focused on distributed tracing, service-mesh telemetry, and application performance monitoring for cloud-native stacks. It was designed from day one around the complexity of microservices and service meshes, so it bundles tracing, metrics, logs, events, and alerting into a single backend instead of asking you to glue them together.

## What SkyWalking Does
- Collects distributed traces from Java, .NET, Node.js, Python, Go, PHP, Rust, and LUA agents.
- Ingests OpenTelemetry, Zipkin, Jaeger, Prometheus, and eBPF-based profiling data out of the box.
- Builds topology maps of services, instances, endpoints, and external dependencies automatically.
- Correlates logs and traces via a shared trace/segment ID and searchable tag query language.
- Provides alerting, metric analysis language (MAL/OAL), and dashboards in a single OAP backend.

## Architecture Overview
The core backend is called OAP (Observability Analysis Platform), written in Java. Agents and collectors push data to OAP via gRPC or HTTP; OAP parses it through stream analysis pipelines, produces metrics from traces using the Observability Analysis Language, and persists everything to a pluggable storage layer (Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, BanyanDB, MySQL/PostgreSQL, TiDB). The Rocketbot UI and a GraphQL API sit on top. For service meshes, SkyWalking includes Envoy ALS receivers and Rover, an eBPF agent that profiles processes on Kubernetes nodes without any code changes.

## Self-Hosting & Configuration
- Helm chart: `helm install skywalking oci://registry-1.docker.io/apache/skywalking-helm` with value overrides for storage.
- For production, run BanyanDB or Elasticsearch 8.x — avoid H2 beyond evaluation.
- Scale OAP horizontally behind a headless service; SkyWalking uses Zookeeper or Kubernetes for cluster coordination.
- Tune `core.recordDataTTL` and `core.metricsDataTTL` to bound storage growth.
- Enable the alarm engine via `alarm-settings.yml` and plug in webhooks, Slack, DingTalk, or PagerDuty.

## Key Features
- Native support for both agent-based instrumentation and service-mesh telemetry.
- eBPF profiling with Rover for CPU/off-CPU and network profiling without recompilation.
- Log/trace correlation and trace-to-metrics conversion via the OAL scripting language.
- Browser Real User Monitoring (RUM) agent for frontend performance data.
- BanyanDB: a purpose-built observability database written in Go, shipped by the same project.

## Comparison with Similar Tools
- **Jaeger** — strong distributed tracing but lacks integrated metrics and logs pipeline.
- **Prometheus + Grafana + Loki + Tempo** — powerful stack, but you assemble and operate four systems.
- **Elastic APM** — tight Elasticsearch coupling; SkyWalking is storage-agnostic.
- **Datadog APM** — SaaS, per-host pricing; SkyWalking is self-hostable and Apache-licensed.
- **SigNoz** — similar all-in-one goal, smaller scale; SkyWalking has broader agent coverage.

## FAQ
**Q:** Can SkyWalking ingest OpenTelemetry data?
A: Yes. The OTel collector can ship OTLP traces, metrics, and logs directly to OAP.

**Q:** Does the Java agent require code changes?
A: No. Attach it via `-javaagent` and it auto-instruments common frameworks.

**Q:** What storage should I choose for production?
A: BanyanDB for observability-native workloads, or Elasticsearch/OpenSearch if you already run one.

**Q:** Is it viable for non-Java stacks?
A: Absolutely. Node.js, Python, Go (via SkyAPM-go2sky), .NET Core, and PHP agents are first-class.

## Sources
- https://github.com/apache/skywalking
- https://skywalking.apache.org/docs/


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Source: https://tokrepo.com/en/workflows/977a1d0a-38d6-11f1-9bc6-00163e2b0d79
Author: Script Depot