rudyLi/zipkin

Zipkin is a distributed tracing system. It helps gather timing data needed to troubleshoot latency problems in microservice architectures. The front end is a "waterfall" style graph of service calls showing call durations as horizontal bars:

Running Zipkin

Zipkin minimally needs a datastore, query and UI server. Some architectures also include a collection tier (ex polling Kafka).

If you are familiar with Docker, the quickest way to get started quickly is to use the Docker Zipkin project, which (in addition to being able to build docker images) provides scripts and a docker-compose.yml for launching pre-built images, e.g.

$ git clone https://github.com/openzipkin/docker-zipkin
$ cd docker-zipkin
$ docker-compose up

If you are happy building from source you can use the scripts in the bin directory of this repository.

Here's how to start zipkin using the default file-based backend and view traces.

# get the zipkin source and change to its directory
$ git clone https://github.com/openzipkin/zipkin; cd zipkin
# start the query server in a new terminal session or tab
$ ./bin/query
# start the collector server in a new terminal session or tab
$ ./bin/collector
# start the web server in a new terminal session or tab
$ ./bin/web
# create dummy traces
$ ./bin/tracegen
# open the ui and look at them!
$ open http://localhost:8080/

Full documentation

See http://twitter.github.com/zipkin, including the list of existing tracers.

Get involved

Join the openzipkin/zipkin gitter chat for questions and to talk with the developers. Otherwise, there are two mailing lists you can use to get in touch with other users and developers.

Users: https://groups.google.com/group/zipkin-user

Developers: https://groups.google.com/group/zipkin-dev

Issues

Noticed a bug? Please file an issue

Build

If you can't use a release or snapshot build, you can build zipkin's service jars directly from your fork using gradle.

$ git clone https://github.com/YOUR_USER/zipkin.git
$ cd zipkin/
$ ./gradlew shadowJar
$ ls */build/libs/*all.jar

See zipkin-web/README.md if you experience issues from npm.

IntelliJ IDEA

The most reliable way to import zipkin is to use the Gradle command-line and open the resulting project into Intellij.

Note Do not import as a Gradle project. If you do, you'll likely see classpath or other build related problems. That's why we use the command-line.

To build the project file, close any open window for zipkin and (re)generate the content like so:

$ ./gradlew cleanIdea idea

Import the the result via File, Open, (path you invoked gradlew). Dismiss any pop-ups about unlinked Gradle projects, as clicking those will likely break your project.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

Areas where we'd love to see contributions:

adding tracing to more libraries and protocols
interesting reports generated with Hadoop from the trace data
extending collection to more transports and storage systems
trace data visualizations in the web UI

rudyLi / zipkin