Before you can view the trace data of your application in the Tracing Analysis console, you must use a client to report the trace data to Tracing Analysis. This topic shows you how to use SkyWalking to report the data of Java applications.
Prerequisites
- SkyWalking 6.X.X, 7.X.X, or 8.X.X is downloaded from the Download the SkyWalking releases page. We recommend that you download SkyWalking 8.0.1. The decompressed folder Agent is placed in a directory that can be accessed by Java processes.
- All plug-ins are placed in the
/plugins
directory. If you add a plug-in to the directory during the startup phase, the plug-in takes effect. If you delete a plug-in from the directory, the plug-in becomes ineffective. By default, log files are saved in the/logs
directory.
- Log on to the Tracing Analysis console. In the left-side navigation pane, click Cluster Configurations.
- On the Cluster Configurations tab, click the Access point information tab. Then, turn on Show Token for the Cluster Information parameter.
- Set the Client parameter to SkyWalking.
- In the Related Information column of the table in the lower part, click the copy icons next to the endpoint and agent.authentication information that you want to use.
Note: If you deploy your application in an Alibaba Cloud production environment, select a VPC endpoint. Otherwise, select a public endpoint.
Background information
SkyWalking is a popular application performance monitoring (APM) service developed in China. SkyWalking is designed for microservices, cloud-native architectures, and container-based architectures. Container-based architectures include Docker, Kubernetes, and Mesos. The core of SkyWalking is a distributed tracing system.
To use SkyWalking to report Java application data to the Tracing Analysis console, you must first instrument the application. SkyWalking not only provides auto-instrument agents such as Dubbo, gRPC, JDBC, OkHttp, Spring, Tomcat, Struts, and Jedis, but also allows you to manually instrument applications. This topic shows you how to automatically instrument applications.
The following figure shows how to report data by using SkyWalking.
Use SkyWalking to automatically instrument a Java application
FAQ
Q: Why am I unable to create an application after SkyWalking is properly connected to the server?

If no data is reported, check whether sampling is enabled, the data is filtered, or the request for using Tracing Analysis is not triggered.