tracing-java

Zipkin-style call tracing libraries.

• com.palantir.tracing:tracing - The key Tracer class, which stores trace information in a ThreadLocal. Also includes classes for convenient integration with SLF4J and executor services.
• com.palantir.tracing:tracing-api - constants and pure data objects
• com.palantir.tracing:tracing-jaxrs - utilities to wrap StreamingOutput responses with a new trace.
• com.palantir.tracing:tracing-okhttp3 - OkhttpTraceInterceptor, which adds the appropriate headers to outgoing requests.
• com.palantir.tracing:tracing-jersey - TraceEnrichingFilter, a jaxrs filter which reads headers from incoming requests and writes headers to outgoing responses. A traceId is stored in the jaxrs request context under the key com.palantir.tracing.traceId.

Clients and servers propagate call trace ids across JVM boundaries according to the Zipkin specification. In particular, clients insert X-B3-TraceId: <Trace ID> HTTP headers into all requests which get propagated by Jetty servers into subsequent client invocations.

Usage

Example of how to use the tracing library:

// build.gradle
dependencies {
  compile "com.palantir.tracing:tracing:$version"
}

Tracer.subscribe("SLF4J", AsyncSlf4jSpanObserver.of(executor));

try {
    Tracer.startSpan("doSomeComputation");
    doSomeComputation();  // may itself invoke cross-service or local traced calls
} finally {
    Tracer.completeSpan(); // triggers all span observers
}

The example above demonstrates how the Tracer library supports intra-thread tracing.

Logging with SLF4J

By default, the instrumentation forwards trace and span information through HTTP headers, but does not emit completed spans to a log file or to Zipkin. Span observers are static (similar to SLF4J appenders) and can be configured as follows:

// Emit all completed spans to a default SLF4J logger:
Tracer.subscribe("SLF4J" /* user-defined name */, AsyncSlf4jSpanObserver.of(executor));

// No longer emit span events to SLF4J:
Tracer.unsubscribe("SLF4J");

Note that span observers are static; a server typically subscribes span observers in its initialization phase. Libraries should never register span observers (since they can trample observers registered by consumers of the library whose themselves register observers).

License

This repository is made available under the Apache 2.0 License.