Full‑Link Monitoring in Microservice Architectures: Concepts, Requirements, Architecture and Comparison of Zipkin, SkyWalking and Pinpoint
This article explains the need for full‑link monitoring in microservice systems, outlines its goals and functional modules, describes the core data structures of tracing such as Span and Annotation, and provides a detailed comparison of three popular APM solutions—Zipkin, SkyWalking and Pinpoint—covering performance impact, scalability, data analysis, developer transparency, topology visualization and community support.