SkyWalking is an application performance monitoring system and observability platform designed to collect and analyze metrics, traces, and logs from distributed microservices. It functions as a distributed tracing platform and a telemetry data pipeline that ingests and aggregates observability data from various language agents.
The project features an AI-powered anomaly detector that uses machine learning to calculate metric baselines and identify irregular URI patterns. It includes an eBPF performance profiler for diagnosing CPU and network bottlenecks at the kernel level and generates interactive service topology visualizations to map dependencies between distributed services.
The system covers broad capability areas including agent-based data collection, log data processing, and performance alerting. It employs a multi-backend storage abstraction and a service provider interface to support custom data receivers and storage backends.
The project provides tooling for backend infrastructure orchestration using container composition and a command line interface for system administration.