Distributed tracing is a technique used in software engineering and application performance monitoring to track and visualize the flow of requests as they traverse through a distributed system or a microservices architecture. The primary goal of distributed tracing is to gain insights into the performance, latency, and dependencies between different components of a complex application.
- Setting up the Zipkin Server: Start by deploying a Zipkin server. You can run it locally, in a container, or use cloud-based Zipkin services. The server will collect trace data sent by your microservices and provide a user interface for visualizing that data.
# To run Zipkin locally with Docker:
docker run -d -p 9411:9411 openzipkin/zipkin
- Integrating Zipkin with Microservices: To enable distributed tracing in your microservices, you’ll need to integrate Zipkin-compatible tracing libraries. One popular choice is Spring Cloud Sleuth for Java-based applications. Here are the steps to integrate Sleuth:
1) Add Spring Cloud Sleuth and Zipkin dependencies to your microservices:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-zipkin
</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-sleuth
</artifactId>
</dependency>
-
2) Configure your microservices to send trace data to the Zipkin server. You can specify the Zipkin server’s location in your application.properties or application.yml:
spring.zipkin.base-url=http://zipkin-server-host:9411
- 3) Spring Cloud Sleuth will automatically instrument your code by adding trace and span information to your logs. It also generates and propagates trace IDs and spans across service boundaries.
- Making Requests: Now that your microservices are instrumented with Zipkin, you can make requests as you normally would. As requests flow through your microservices, trace data is collected and sent to the Zipkin server.
- Visualizing Traces: Open the Zipkin server’s web user interface by navigating to http://zipkin-server-host:9411. In the UI, you can search for traces, view detailed information about request processing, and understand the interactions between your microservices.
- Custom Annotations and Logging: You can add custom annotations to your code to provide more context to your traces. This can be helpful for marking important events within your services. You can also include logs with trace and span IDs, which will appear alongside the trace data in the Zipkin UI.
