[jhinds]

Neat! I was looking into tracing solutions for our k8s cluster the other day and was going to look into setting up Zipkin. Now I'll this to my list of tools to evaluate. I found this blog post by uber informative https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/ so maybe there is no need to even setting up Zipkin and just start with Jaegar?

[dankohn1]

Most folks will choose either Zipkin or Jaeger, but both are OpenTracing-compatible distributed tracing systems. You might find the Cloud Native Landscape useful for thinking about the options: https://github.com/cncf/landscape/blob/master/README.md

Disclosure: I’m the executive director of CNCF, which just adopted Jaeger 2 weeks ago, and I’m an author of the landscape.

[yoshuaw]

Last I checked "OpenTracing-compatible" only went as far as using common terminology. Tbh I was a bit disappointed by this; has more been defined since? E.g. are there now shared schemas, APIs of sorts?

[muninn_]

I have used that landscape document as a very informative point of reference for the last couple of months. Thank you for creating it.

[jpkrohling_jpk]

If you want to trace applications deployed on Kubernetes, you might benefit from Jaeger's Kubernetes templates: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger-kubernetes

[wisswazz]

Last week I did a test of Linkerd with Zipkin for k8s clusters. Works like a charm, buy still a bit more work to use Jaeger as Zipkin replacement, as they do not support the same protocols yet. I believe https://github.com/linkerd/linkerd-zipkin will fix that but haven't tested yet.

[mrmondo]

I see Zipkin is a Java app, without sounding like I’m hating on a language for no reason here - but I wonder if it’s awfully heavy and slow to launch like so most other java apps? By comparison I’d expect a tracer written in Go would be significantly more efficient.

[vbsteven]

Does slow startup time matter for services that are supposed to be running continuously in a cluster environment?

I have no doubt that a Go tracer would start orders of magnitudes faster than a Java one (especially if it pulls in spring or other web-related dependencies for the zipkin UI) but I think it is irrelevant.

[idunno246]

it's irrelevant. if you take a look at the diagrams in the blog post that include zipkin, it's is basically only the query/frontend portion - the tracing itself is done natively in the language the code is written in, and outputted to cassandra. The zipkin part is a long running server that just needs to query cassandra.

[weitzj]

I am evaluating Google Stackdriver as well, with a zipkin collector. Will see...