SYSTEM Cited by 1 source
Merckx (Uber)¶
Merckx was Uber's first in-house distributed tracing system, built during the 2013–14 microservice-platform era. Pulled instrumentation data from a stream in Kafka and reconstructed cross-service call graphs from those events. Retired in favor of Jaeger when services increasingly adopted asynchronous patterns that Merckx's stream-based instrumentation didn't handle well. (Source: sources/2024-03-14-highscalability-brief-history-of-scaling-uber)
Historical-only reference today, but it anchors the evolution narrative: Uber's tracing substrate went Merckx → Zipkin-inspired → Jaeger, following the general industry move from sync-RPC-dominated to async-workflow-heavy service graphs.
Seen in¶
- sources/2024-03-14-highscalability-brief-history-of-scaling-uber — named as Uber's pre-Jaeger tracing implementation; replaced once async patterns became dominant.
Related¶
- systems/jaeger — successor system, still in production at Uber.
- systems/kafka — transport substrate Merckx used.
- companies/uber — origin org.