Zipkin (Tracing)
Introduction
Zipkin is a distributed tracing system. It helps gather timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems in microservice architectures.
It manages both the collection and lookup of this data. Zipkin’s design is based on the Google Dapper paper.
OpenCensus Java has support for this exporter available through package io.opencensus.exporter.trace.zipkin
This guide makes use of Zipkin for visualizing your data. For assistance setting up Zipkin, Click here for a guided codelab.
Creating the exporter
To create the exporter, we’ll need to:
- Create an exporter in code
- Have the Zipkin endpoint available to receive traces
If using Maven, add these to your pom.xml file
<properties>
<project.build.sourceEncoding>UTF-8</project.build.sourceEncoding>
<opencensus.version>0.15.0</opencensus.version> <!-- The OpenCensus version to use -->
</properties>
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>io.opencensus</groupId>
<artifactId>opencensus-api</artifactId>
<version>${opencensus.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>io.opencensus</groupId>
<artifactId>opencensus-exporter-trace-zipkin</artifactId>
<version>${opencensus.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>io.opencensus</groupId>
<artifactId>opencensus-impl</artifactId>
<version>${opencensus.version}</version>
<scope>runtime</scope>
</dependency>
</dependencies>Instrument your code with the following snippet:
package io.opencensus.tutorial.zipkin;
import io.opencensus.exporter.trace.zipkin.ZipkinTraceExporter;
public class ZipkinTutorial {
public static void main(String ...args) throws Exception {
ZipkinTraceExporter.createAndRegister("http://localhost:9411/api/v2/spans", "service-a");
}
}Viewing your traces
Please visit the Zipkin UI endpoint http://localhost:9411
Project link
You can find out more about the Zipkin project at https://zipkin.io/