Hypertrace is an open source cloud-native distributed tracing and observability platform designed to provide visibility into development and production distributed systems. The platform converts distributed trace data into actionable insights for different teams within an organization. Infrastructure teams can use Hypertrace to identify which services are causing system overload, service teams can diagnose why specific user requests failed or which applications risk their service objectives, and deployment teams can determine if new versions are causing problems.
The platform enables several key capabilities including root cause analysis when system failures occur, monitoring of rollouts with key metric comparisons, identification of performance bottlenecks such as slow API calls or database queries, and observation of microservice dependencies and applications. Hypertrace accepts trace data from applications already instrumented to send traces to Zipkin or Jaeger, making it compatible with existing instrumentation standards.
Getting started with Hypertrace is straightforward through Docker Compose for quick evaluation. The platform requires Docker Engine 17.12.0 or higher and Docker Compose 1.21.0 or higher, with a recommended minimum of 4 GB of memory and 4 CPUs allocated to Docker Desktop. Once running, the Hypertrace UI is accessible at localhost:2020. The repository includes a sample application that runs at localhost:8081 to generate test trace requests for evaluation purposes.
For production deployments, Hypertrace supports Kubernetes through Helm charts, enabling installation across various Kubernetes flavors, on-premise servers, and cloud providers. The repository contains deployment documentation and Helm charts in its kubernetes directory. However, the simplified hypertrace-ingester and hypertrace-service components are recommended only for local deployment and quick-start scenarios, not for production use due to scaling limitations and reliability concerns. Production deployments should use individual components instead.
The repository is written primarily in Shell and is classified across multiple observability and monitoring categories including distributed tracing, telemetry data collection, trace visualization, span processing, latency analysis, and performance monitoring. GitGenius tracking shows the project maintains responsive issue and pull request handling with a median response latency of 0.0 hours across tracked items. The project shares contributors with related repositories including wazero/wazero, tetratelabs/func-e, and apache/pinot.
Hypertrace follows an open core model where the core platform including distributed trace ingestion and exploration features is available under the Apache 2.0 license. Additional features such as Services, Endpoints, Backends, and Service Graph functionality in the Community Edition are available under the Traceable Community license. The project maintains an active community with a public Slack workspace, monthly community meetings held on the last Thursday of each month, and GitHub discussions for feature requests and usage questions. Docker images for various Hypertrace components are published on Docker Hub for easy deployment and integration.
