Tags: spring, spring-boot, microservices, spring-cloud, cloud

Setting Up Zipkin Service

Introduction

When it comes to microservices, tracing what happens becomes enormously more complex. You can’t just put a breakpoint and debug your way through just like how you would do with a monolith. Fortunately, folks at Twitter came up with Zipkin. Used and popularized by engineers Netflix and Uber, Zipkin became sort of a de facto choice for distributed system’s tracing solution. And just like with other popular libraries, integrating Zipkin to Spring Boot is a matter of plug and play.

There are 2 components to use Zipkin:

Zipkin Server (zipkin-server & zipkin-autoconfigure-ui): This will be our service which stores all our tracing data and visualize them.
Zipkin Client (zipkin-cloud-starter-zipkin): This will send stream our tracing data from a client’s service.

Setting up Zipkin Service’s Configuration

In the existing config’s git:

vim zipkin-service.properties

### Add the below to zipkin-service.properties
server.port=${PORT:9411}
spring.datasource.initialize = false
spring.sleuth.enabled = false
zipkin.store.type = mem
## End of zipkin-service.properties

git add zipkin-service.properties
git commit -m "Add zipkin-service.properties"

Setting up Zipkin Service

Go to https://start.spring.io/
Type zipkin-service as the “Artifact” name, add Zipkin UI, Eureka Discovery and Config Client dependencies, and “Generate Project”:
Open the project in your favorite Java IDE (mine is IntelliJ)

Add the below zipkin server’s dependency to pom.xml:

 <dependency>
     <groupId>io.zipkin.java</groupId>
     <artifactId>zipkin-server</artifactId>
 </dependency>

Add @EnableDiscoveryClient and @EnableZipkinServer in src/main/java/ZipkinServiceApplication:

 package com.example.zipkinservice;

 import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
 import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;
 import org.springframework.cloud.client.discovery.EnableDiscoveryClient;
 import zipkin.server.EnableZipkinServer;

 @SpringBootApplication
 @EnableDiscoveryClient
 @EnableZipkinServer
 public class ZipkinServiceApplication {
    
     public static void main(String[] args) {
         SpringApplication.run(ZipkinServiceApplication.class, args);
     }
 }

in src/main/resources, create a new file called bootstrap.properties, add the below:

 # tell config service what is the name of the service and corresponding config to retrieve
    
 spring.application.name=zipkin-service
    
 # tell the location the location of config server

 spring.cloud.config.uri=http://localhost:8888

Run ZipkinServiceApplication and voila! Your Zipkin server is started!
Go to http://localhost:9411/zipkin/ to visit Zipkin’s UI. There is currently nothing, but soon, we’ll register our microservices in the next posts and be able to trace requests going through the pipeline.

Conclusion:

We have now set up our zipkin service which can diagrammatically show a timeline of requests going through our microservices. In the next posts, you will see how we can use Zipkin Client to feed data to our server.

Next Up

Setting Up Hystrix Dashboard

Microservices with Spring Boot & Spring Cloud

Part V: Setting Up Zipkin Service