Distributed tracing with Zipkin

In this tutorial, we’ll configure Emissary to initiate a trace on some sample requests, and use Zipkin to visualize them.

Before you get started

This tutorial assumes you have already followed Emissary Getting Started guide. If you haven’t done that already, you should do that now.

After completing the Getting Started guide you will have a Kubernetes cluster running Emissary and the Quote service. Let’s walk through adding tracing to this setup.

1. Deploy Zipkin

In this tutorial, you will use a simple deployment of the open-source Zipkin distributed tracing system to store and visualize Emissary-generated traces. The trace data will be stored in memory within the Zipkin container, and you will be able to explore the traces via the Zipkin web UI.

First, add the following YAML to a file named zipkin.yaml. This configuration will create a Zipkin Deployment that uses the openzipkin/zipkin container image and also an associated Service. We will also include a TracingService that configures Emissary to use the Zipkin service (running on the default port of 9411) to provide tracing support.

---
apiVersion: getambassador.io/v3alpha1
kind: TracingService
metadata:
  name: tracing
spec:
  service: "zipkin:9411"
  driver: zipkin
  config: {}
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  name: zipkin
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: zipkin
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: zipkin
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: zipkin
          image: openzipkin/zipkin
          env:
            # note: in-memory storage holds all data in memory, purging older data upon a span limit.
            #       you should use a proper storage in production environments
            - name: STORAGE_TYPE
              value: mem
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  labels:
    name: zipkin
  name: zipkin
spec:
  ports:
    - port: 9411
      targetPort: 9411
  selector:
    app: zipkin

Next, deploy this configuration into your cluster:

$ kubectl apply -f zipkin.yaml

As a final step we want to restart Emissary as this is necessary to add the tracing header. This command will restart all the Pods (assuming Emissary is installed in the ambassador namespace):

$ kubectl -n ambassador rollout restart deploy

2. Generate some requests

Use curl to generate a few requests to an existing Emissary Mapping. You may need to perform many requests since only a subset of random requests are sampled and instrumented with traces.

$ curl -L $AMBASSADOR_IP/backend/

3. Test traces

To test things out, we’ll need to access the Zipkin UI. If you’re on Kubernetes, get the name of the Zipkin pod:

$ kubectl get pods
NAME                                   READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
ambassador-5ffcfc798-c25dc             2/2       Running   0          1d
prometheus-prometheus-0                2/2       Running   0          113d
zipkin-868b97667c-58v4r                1/1       Running   0          2h

And then use kubectl port-forward to access the pod:

$ kubectl port-forward zipkin-868b97667c-58v4r 9411

Open your web browser to http://localhost:9411 for the Zipkin UI.

If you’re on minikube you can access the NodePort directly, and this ports number can be obtained via the minikube services list command. If you are using Docker for Mac/Windows, you can use the kubectl get svc command to get the same information.

$ minikube service list
|-------------|----------------------|-----------------------------|
|  NAMESPACE  |         NAME         |             URL             |
|-------------|----------------------|-----------------------------|
| default     | ambassador-admin     | http://192.168.99.107:30319 |
| default     | ambassador           | http://192.168.99.107:31893 |
| default     | zipkin               | http://192.168.99.107:31043 |
|-------------|----------------------|-----------------------------|

Open your web browser to the Zipkin dashboard http://192.168.99.107:31043/zipkin/.

In the Zipkin UI, click on the “Find Traces” button to get a listing instrumented traces. Each of the traces that are displayed can be clicked on, which provides further information about each span and associated metadata.

Learn more

For more details about configuring the external tracing service, read the documentation on external tracing.