Zipkin (Tracing)

• Introduction
• Installing the exporter
• Creating the exporter
• Viewing your traces
• Project link

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 Node.js has support for this exporter available, distributed through NPM package @opencensus/exporter-zipkin

Installing the exporter

You can install OpenCensus Zipkin Exporter by running these steps:

npm install @opencensus/nodejs
npm install @opencensus/exporter-zipkin

Creating the exporter

Now let’s use the Zipkin exporter:

const tracing = require('@opencensus/nodejs');
const { ZipkinTraceExporter } = require('@opencensus/exporter-zipkin');

// Add your zipkin url (ex http://localhost:9411/api/v2/spans)
// and application name to the Zipkin options
const zipkinOptions = {
  url: 'your-zipkin-url',
  serviceName: 'your-application-name'
};

const exporter = new ZipkinTraceExporter(zipkinOptions);
tracing.registerExporter(exporter).start();

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/