Brave is a library used to capture latency information about distributed operations. It reports this data to Zipkin as spans.
Zipkin is based on Dapper. Dapper (dutch) = Brave (english)... So, that's where the name comes from.
You can look at our example project for how to trace a simple web application.
Brave's dependency-free tracer library works against JRE6+.
This is the underlying api that instrumentation use to time operations
and add tags that describe them. This library also includes code that
parses X-B3-TraceId headers.
Most users won't write tracing code directly. Rather, they reuse instrumentation others have written. Check our instrumentation and Zipkin's list before rolling your own. Common tracing libraries like JDBC, Servlet and Spring already exist. Instrumentation written here are tested and benchmarked.
If you are trying to trace legacy applications, you may be interested in Spring XML Configuration. This allows you to setup tracing without any custom code.
You may want to put trace IDs into your log files, or change thread local behavior. Look at our context libraries, for integration with tools such as SLF4J.
Releases are uploaded to Bintray and synchronized to Maven Central
Snapshots are uploaded to JFrog after commits to master.