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MicroProfile: OpenTracing

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kgibm edited this page Mar 21, 2018 · 32 revisions

MicroProfile OpenTracing

The Eclipse MicroProfile project is an open collaboration between developers, the community, and vendors to create a programming model for microservices applications which is complementary to JEE.

The Eclipse MicroProfile OpenTracing project defines the specification and an API for tracing JAX-RS web service operations as they flow into, within, between, and out of servers. This trace information can be fed to OpenTracing-compliant distributed tracing systems such as Zipkin. Then, the distributed tracing systems may be used to display each JAX-RS call and how long it took, track performance, diagnose problems, feed load distribution algorithms, etc. This is particularly useful in a microservices architecture because such architectures often have many separate JVMs tied together with JAX-RS calls.

Version 1.0 of OpenTracing was delivered as part of version 1.3 of the overall MicroProfile.

Important links:

OpenTracing in OpenLiberty

OpenLiberty contains two features to support OpenTracing: opentracing-1.0 and mpOpenTracing-1.0. opentracing-1.0 was delivered before the MP OpenTracing 1.0 specification was finalized, and mpOpenTracing-1.0 delivered the full specification compliance with OpenTracing 1.0. Therefore, unless a user is on a version of Liberty before mpOpenTracing-1.0 was released, users should just use mpOpenTracing-1.0 which a superset of opentracing-1.0 and implicitly enables it.

To use MP OpenTracing in OpenLiberty, the user must create a user feature with an io.opentracing.Tracer implementation. IBM has created sample code for a user feature that connects to Zipkin. After the Tracer implementation has been properly installed as a user feature, mpOpenTracing-1.0 and the user feature must be enabled as features in server.xml. For example:

<featureManager>
  <feature>mpOpenTracing-1.0</feature>
  <feature>usr:opentracingZipkin-0.30</feature>
</featureManager>

Additional configuration in server.xml may be needed for the particular user feature.

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