Mastering SkyWalking APM: Installation, Configuration, and .NET/Java Tracing

As microservice architectures become popular, request paths often form complex call chains, and a failure in any node can jeopardize overall stability, highlighting that no architecture is a silver bullet.

To quickly locate and resolve performance issues in such environments, Application Performance Management (APM) tools are indispensable, and SkyWalking stands out as a robust, open‑source APM solution offering distributed tracing, metric analysis, and service dependency visualization.

SkyWalking’s core consists of a data analysis and storage platform that receives metrics via HTTP or gRPC, aggregates them in the Collector, and stores results in Elasticsearch, H2, MySQL, TiDB, etc., while the UI provides visual dashboards. It supports data from SkyWalking agents, Zipkin, Istio, Envoy, and more.

The essential components to deploy are the SkyWalking Collector, the UI, and a storage backend; the Collector and UI are bundled in the official download, so only the storage needs provisioning.

Environment Requirements

JDK 8+, Elasticsearch 6.x (ensure ports 8080,10800,11800,12800 are free). Modify config/elasticsearch.yml as follows:

# Modify
# If cluster.name is not set to CollectorDBCluster, adjust SkyWalking config
cluster.name: CollectorDBCluster
network.host: 0.0.0.0
# Increase thread pool queue size
thread_pool.bulk.queue_size: 1000

Download SkyWalking

Download the official compiled package from the SkyWalking website.

Start SkyWalking

By default, config/application.yml uses H2; change it to Elasticsearch after ensuring Elasticsearch is running.

SkyWalking starts two services: the Collector (oapService) and the UI (webappService). In the extracted bin directory, use the provided bat scripts for Windows or sh scripts for Linux, or run the combined startup script to launch both.

After a successful start, access the UI at http://localhost:8080 (default credentials: admin/admin).

Java Project Integration

Deploy the SkyWalking Java agent ( skywalking-agent.jar) from the agent folder following the official documentation.

.NET Project Integration

For .NET Core projects, install the SkyAPM NuGet package: Install-Package SkyAPM.Agent.AspNetCore Add required environment variables (typically set in CI pipelines) and create a skyapm.json (or add configuration to appsettings.json) such as:

{
  "SkyWalking": {
    "ServiceName": "WebAPIServiceA",
    "Transport": {
      "gRPC": {
        "Servers": "localhost:11800"
      }
    }
  }
}

Run the application; traces will appear in the SkyWalking UI.

A multi‑service example (source on GitHub) demonstrates clear span timings and a topology graph showing request flow across services.

Note: The current .NET agent does not support gRPC call tracing, and development is ongoing.

Original source: https://www.jianshu.com/p/2fd56627a3cf