chapter six

6 Front-end Destinations

 

This chapter covers

  • What front-end destinations are and what options exist
  • What all-in-ones destinations are and options available
  • How to go about selecting front-ends and all-in-ones

In Chapter 5 we had a look at observability back-ends. Essentially, these are specialized time series databases (TSDBs), general purpose relational databases with a TSDB extension, or columnar datastores that are able to store logs, metrics, and traces. Once you have ingested the signals in a back-end, you can use the back-end to answer observability questions, usually referred to as querying. Tthis process might be a declarative one such as the case with SQL or PromQL or an imperative one, where you, for instance, tell a traces back-end to look up a span by root span ID.

6.1 Front-ends

6.1.1 Grafana

6.1.2 Kibana and OpenSearch Dashboards

6.1.3 Other Open Source Front-ends

6.1.4 Cloud Providers and Commercial Front-ends

6.2 All-In-Ones

6.2.1 CNCF Jaeger

6.2.2 CNCF Pixie

6.2.3 Zipkin

6.2.4 Apache Skywalking

6.2.5 SigNoz

6.2.6 Uptrace

6.2.7 Commercial Offerings

6.3 Selecting Front-ends and All-in-ones

6.4 Summary