[Enhancement Request] non-invasive way to collect/poll/scrap Zipkin/Brave traces

[patpatpat123]

Hello Zipkin team,

This is my first post in this repo.
If not anything else, just wanted to say thanks for this project.
Zipkin has been tremendous for our SpringBoot web applications, and we went from 0 tracing to production level Zipkin through the years, thanks to this project.

Feature

Mon-invasive way to collect/poll/scrap Zipkin/Brave traces please.

Background

Reason why I am asking is that we have a SpringBoot 3+ app that is already generating the brave traces.
It is a micro service architecture, where serviceA talks to serviceB talks to serviceC etc.
Having to just include a jar such as micrometer-tracing-bridge-brave (it was Spring Cloud Zipkin prior to SpringBoot 3) is amazing.

However, SpringBoot needs an intrusive way, meaning, the application needs to bring it a Zipkin jar and configure the Zipkin tracing endpoint in order for the web application to send the traces (default 1 minute) to Zipkin Server.

The web app, the client, needs to know where is the Zipkin server.

I am looking for a non invasive way to do this:

Example Scenario

Taking logs for instance. The SpingBoot logs are left in a log file, then a Splunk forwarder comes and collect/scrap/poll the logs to send the logs to Splunk backend.

The SpringBoot app does not have to know anything about it Splunk.

The same example scenario can be said for metrics, where some kind of Prometheus-agent comes and scrap the metrics (not having the SpringBoot app to know anything about Prometheus)

Rationale

Such feature would help each and every app to decouple the Zipkin Server from the application itself.
We can maybe use some kind of sidecar pattern in order to achieve this.
For logs and metrics, this has been proven very efficient already.

Could you please consider this feature?

Thank you

[codefromthecrypt]

sounds like you are asking for a sidecar, so that you can configure your application to report to localhost, right?