Java Zipkin Exporter

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

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 Hypertrace UI endpoint http://localhost:2020.

Project link

You can find out more about the Zipkin project at https://zipkin.io/