Why Apache SkyWalking Became a Top‑Level Project and What It Offers for Modern APM

Apache SkyWalking, an open‑source application performance monitoring (APM) tool, was announced as a top‑level Apache project after graduating from the Apache incubator.

SkyWalking provides an observability platform that collects, analyzes, aggregates, and visualizes data from services and cloud‑native infrastructure, supporting distributed tracing, metrics, service dependency analysis, and performance diagnostics for microservice, container, and cloud‑native applications.

Key reasons to adopt an APM tool like SkyWalking include gaining insight into system behavior, quickly locating performance bottlenecks, and ensuring stability of complex request chains in microservice architectures.

Features

Performance metrics for services, instances, and endpoints

Root‑cause analysis

Service topology maps

Dependency analysis for services and endpoints

Slow service and endpoint detection

Performance optimization guidance

Distributed tracing with context propagation

Alerting capabilities

Architecture

SkyWalking consists of four logical components:

Probes : agents that collect data from various sources and reformat it for SkyWalking.

Platform backend : a cluster‑deployable service that aggregates, analyzes, and drives data flow to the UI, supporting plug‑in extensions for different data sources and storage backends.

Storage : pluggable storage options such as Elasticsearch, H2, MySQL (including Sharding‑Sphere), or custom implementations.

UI : a powerful, customizable visualization interface.

Data is sent to the SkyWalking collector via HTTP or gRPC, where it is processed and stored, then visualized through the UI.

Adoption

More than 70 companies publicly use SkyWalking, contributing over 100 source‑code contributors from dozens of organizations.

Comparison with Other APM Tools

SkyWalking is compared with other open‑source APM solutions such as Pinpoint, Zipkin, and CAT, highlighting its non‑intrusive design (no bytecode injection) and comprehensive feature set.

References: SkyWalking vs Pinpoint , Official Site .