Zipkin tracing

Enable and configure tracing for Zipkin in GraphOS Router or Apollo Router Core.

For general tracing configuration, refer to Router Tracing Configuration.

OTLP configuration (recommended)

Zipkin supports OTLP ingestion via zipkin-otel, and OpenTelemetry is deprecating the native Zipkin exporters in favor of OTLP. Using the OTLP exporter is recommended:

1telemetry:
2  exporters:
3    tracing:
4      otlp:
5        enabled: true
6        endpoint: "http://${env.ZIPKIN_HOST}:9411"
7        protocol: http

This sends traces to Zipkin using the OTLP protocol.

See OTLP configuration for more details on settings.

Zipkin native configuration

You can configure the router to export tracing data to Zipkin using the native Zipkin exporter:

1telemetry:
2  exporters:
3     tracing:
4       zipkin:
5         enabled: true
6         # Optional endpoint (defaults to http://127.0.0.1:9411/api/v2/spans)
7         endpoint: "http://${env.ZIPKIN_HOST}:9411/api/v2/spans"

enabled

Set to true to enable the Zipkin exporter. Defaults to false.

endpoint

The Zipkin collector endpoint address. Defaults to http://127.0.0.1:9411/api/v2/spans.

batch_processor

All exporters support configuration of a batch span processor with batch_processor.

You must tune your batch_processor configuration if you see any of the following messages in your logs:

• OpenTelemetry trace error occurred: cannot send message to batch processor '<provider>-tracing' as the channel is full

• OpenTelemetry metrics error occurred: cannot send span to the batch span processor because the channel is full

The exact settings depend on the bandwidth available for you to send data to your application performance monitor (APM) and the bandwidth configuration of your APM. Expect to tune these settings over time as your application changes.

You can see how many spans are being dropped by enabling metrics export and looking at the:

• apollo.router.telemetry.batch_processor.errors - The number of errors encountered by exporter batch processors.

  • name: One of apollo-tracing, datadog-tracing, otlp-tracing, zipkin-tracing.

  • error = One of channel closed, channel full.

By looking at the rate of batch processor errors you can decide how to tune your batch processor settings.

1telemetry:
2  exporters:
3    tracing:
4      zipkin:
5        enabled: true
6        batch_processor:
7          max_export_batch_size: 512
8          max_concurrent_exports: 1
9          max_export_timeout: 30s
10          max_queue_size: 2048
11          scheduled_delay: 5s

batch_processor configuration reference

Zipkin native configuration reference