appmetrics-zipkin example for end-to-end tracing

Overview

• Sample featuring two Node.js applications we'll be tracing: one sends a simple request to the other, we can then view the spans on our Zipkin server.
• Useful for showing developers what we get with Zipkin.
• Features idt.js for easy deployments.
• Tested with Node.js 8.9.0, appmetrics-zipkin 1.0.4 (using zipkin 0.10), Zipkin 2.0.0 as part of the Microservice Builder Fabric.
• Created with yo nodeserver.
• The extended documentation here covers Kubernetes deployments.

Requirements

• node and npm: version 6 or 8.
• java: version 8 for Zipkin.
• Optional: a Kubernetes cluster (see our documentation here).

Usage

• Run ./do-it-all.sh to download the Zipkin jar and to start the servers (both the frontend and backend) as background processes
• In your web browser visit localhost:9411 for Zipkin, set the start/end times to be suitably far apart, sort by newest traces first.
• In a new web browser window or tab, visit localhost:3000, fill in the text field with the length of the string you want to pass, then click the button labeled with "Generate a string...".
• Click "Find traces" in Zipkin then explore the web UI to view the gathered trace information.
• To restart both applications (e.g. after making changes) run ./restart-servers.sh. This will also kill the Zipkin server so start that up again with start-zipkin.sh.
• If the environment variable USE_ZIPKIN is set, e.g. as part of the npm start command in getter or pusher's package.json OR in the Dockerfile, data will be sent to the Zipkin server.

Zipkin

This is handled by ./do-it-all.sh, specifically it does:

• ./get-zipkin.sh.
• ./start-zipkin.sh.
• Kill it later with ./kill-zipkin.sh: it's a Java process running with java -jar zipkin.jar

More information on Zipkin itself and the trace data we can collect can be accessed at https://zipkin.io.

Using Kubernetes

Documented here under the kubernetes folder.

Trace data with HTTPS requests?

An example is provided under the https-example folder involving a self-signed certificate.

A notice about copyrights

You are free to use and modify anything here as you want so long as the Apache 2 license permits it!

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