Deprecating Zipkin Exporter
The OpenTelemetry project is deprecating the Zipkin exporter specification in favor of Zipkin’s OTLP ingestion support.
Thank you to all Zipkin contributors for helping OpenTelemetry reach this milestone!
After analyzing usage patterns across language ecosystems, we’ve observed that the community has strongly gravitated toward OTLP, with Zipkin exporters seeing limited adoption — in several languages, even less than the already-deprecated Jaeger exporter. Combined with minimal user engagement on related issues and the availability of alternatives, we believe this is the right time to sunset Zipkin exporters in OTel SDKs.
Timeline and migration path
- Specification deprecation: Effective from December 2025.
- SDK support: Existing stable Zipkin exporters will continue to receive security patches and critical bug fixes until at least December 2026, following the SDK stability guarantees.
- New SDKs: Implementing a Zipkin exporter is not required for new language SDKs.
What should users do?
If you’re currently using a Zipkin exporter, you have two migration paths:
- Switch to OTLP (recommended): Configure your application to send traces using OTLP and enable Zipkin’s OTLP ingestion support.
- Use the Collector: Route your OTLP data through the OpenTelemetry Collector with its Zipkin exporter.
Questions?
Reach out in the #otel-specification channel on CNCF Slack or create an issue in the opentelemetry-specification repository.