InfluxData has added support for tracing and Zipkin to its Telegraf and InfluxDB platforms, providing a way to visualize production systems at the microservice level to understand how and why they misbehave. Tracing allows developers to detect the whole path of how services interact, simplifying troubleshooting in microservice architectures. The new plugin collects spans sent by tracing clients and converts them to Telegraf's internal data format, writing the collected data to an InfluxDB database for visualization using Jaeger's UI. The plugin accepts spans in JSON or Thrift formats, uses Annotations tags and fields to track data from spans, and allows developers to run queries against the stored data to retrieve specific information. This addition addresses the need for a contained unit of code that runs a Zipkin HTTP server in the background, collecting spans at regular intervals and writing them to InfluxDB for visualization.