Apache SkyWalking APM and Observability Platform

This is a repackaged open source software product wherein additional charges apply for cloudimg support services.

## Self-Hosted APM That Delivers Traces in Minutes, Not Days

Apache SkyWalking is an open-source Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and observability platform that collects distributed traces, service and instance metrics, and logs from your applications. It visualizes service topology, latency, throughput, and error rates in a built-in web UI. This image delivers SkyWalking as a single-node appliance - the OAP (Observability Analysis Platform) backend, the web UI, and an embedded Apache BanyanDB datastore - so you can point your first agent at it and see traces within minutes of launch rather than spending days assembling the stack by hand. The current release is Apache SkyWalking 10.4.0.

## Who This Is For

• Platform and SRE teams who need a self-hosted APM inside their own VPC to trace requests across microservices and diagnose latency, without shipping telemetry to a SaaS provider
• Application developers who need a standards-based observability endpoint to instrument services with SkyWalking's native agents (Java, .NET, Node.js, Python, Go and more)
• Teams evaluating open-source observability for a single-tenant or proof-of-concept deployment who want to skip infrastructure assembly and focus on instrumentation

## What You Get on First Boot

• Apache SkyWalking OAP - the observability analysis backend with agent receivers for gRPC and HTTP telemetry
• The SkyWalking web UI - bound to loopback and fronted by nginx with HTTP basic authentication
• Apache BanyanDB - the purpose-built storage engine the SkyWalking 10.x line is designed around, running standalone on the loopback interface
• Eclipse Temurin JDK 17 as the runtime for the two JVM services
• A dedicated unprivileged skywalking service account and systemd units that start the platform on boot

## Why Apache BanyanDB Instead of Elasticsearch

SkyWalking needs a storage engine. This image ships Apache BanyanDB, licensed entirely under Apache-2.0 - the observability database the SkyWalking project builds and maintains for exactly this purpose. Unlike source-available search engines (e.g., those under SSPL), BanyanDB requires no license compliance review, no cluster sizing for a separate search infrastructure, and no additional operational overhead. Every byte of this appliance is open source and redistributable.

## Architecture Overview

The stack runs as cooperating services on a single instance. nginx receives inbound HTTP on port 80 and reverse-proxies to the SkyWalking UI on the loopback interface, enforcing HTTP basic authentication. The UI reads observability data from the OAP server, which stores and queries traces, metrics, and logs in a co-located BanyanDB node also bound to loopback. All telemetry storage lives on a dedicated 20 GiB EBS volume mounted at /var/lib/skywalking - separate from the OS disk, independently resizable, and preserved across instance stops.

## Secure By Default

• A one-shot first-boot service generates a unique UI password on every instance and writes it to a root-only file at /root/apache-skywalking-credentials.txt
• The UI, OAP agent receivers, and BanyanDB datastore are not world-open: the security group opens only SSH (22) and the nginx-fronted UI (80)
• OAP telemetry receivers (gRPC 11800, HTTP 12800) are reached by your agents only when you explicitly open those ports to your application network range

## Getting Started

1. Launch the image on an m5.large instance or larger with port 22 open to your management network and port 80 open to reach the UI

2. Connect over SSH as the default login user for your variant

3. Retrieve the generated UI password: sudo cat /root/apache-skywalking-credentials.txt

4. Open the web UI at http://your-instance/ and sign in as admin with the generated password

5. Open OAP receiver ports (11800 for gRPC, 12800 for HTTP) to your application network and point your SkyWalking agents at the instance

6. Watch traces, service topology, metrics, and logs appear in the UI as your applications report telemetry

## 24/7 cloudimg Support

Every deployment is backed by cloudimg engineers available around the clock by email and live chat. Support covers deployment and sizing guidance, agent instrumentation across languages, exposing the UI securely behind TLS, BanyanDB storage management and retention, backup and restore of the data volume, and SkyWalking and JVM tuning and troubleshooting. Critical issues receive a one-hour average response time.

Apache, Apache SkyWalking, and Apache BanyanDB are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All product and company names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.