Istio comes with backends for tracing, such as Jaeger, LightStep, and Zipkin. We installed Istio using a demo profile, which has Jaeger as its backend. If Zipkin needs to be used as a backend, this can be done while installing Istio by adding the --set tracing.provider=zipkin Helm option.

Istio supports a variety of backends, all of which can be enabled through the use of adapters.