13. Sending Spans to Zipkin

By default, if you add spring-cloud-starter-zipkin as a dependency to your project, when the span is closed, it is sent to Zipkin over HTTP. The communication is asynchronous. You can configure the URL by setting the spring.zipkin.baseUrl property, as follows:

spring.zipkin.baseUrl: https://192.168.99.100:9411/

If you want to find Zipkin through service discovery, you can pass the Zipkin’s service ID inside the URL, as shown in the following example for zipkinserver service ID:

spring.zipkin.baseUrl: http://zipkinserver/

To disable this feature just set spring.zipkin.discoveryClientEnabled to `false.

When the Discovery Client feature is enabled, Sleuth uses LoadBalancerClient to find the URL of the Zipkin Server. It means that you can set up the load balancing configuration e.g. via Ribbon.

zipkinserver:
  ribbon:
    ListOfServers: host1,host2

If you have web, rabbit, or kafka together on the classpath, you might need to pick the means by which you would like to send spans to zipkin. To do so, set web, rabbit, or kafka to the spring.zipkin.sender.type property. The following example shows setting the sender type for web:

spring.zipkin.sender.type: web

To customize the RestTemplate that sends spans to Zipkin via HTTP, you can register the ZipkinRestTemplateCustomizer bean.

@Configuration
class MyConfig {
	@Bean ZipkinRestTemplateCustomizer myCustomizer() {
		return new ZipkinRestTemplateCustomizer() {
			@Override
			void customize(RestTemplate restTemplate) {
				// customize the RestTemplate
			}
		};
	}
}

If, however, you would like to control the full process of creating the RestTemplate object, you will have to create a bean of zipkin2.reporter.Sender type.

	@Bean Sender myRestTemplateSender(ZipkinProperties zipkin,
			ZipkinRestTemplateCustomizer zipkinRestTemplateCustomizer) {
		RestTemplate restTemplate = mySuperCustomRestTemplate();
		zipkinRestTemplateCustomizer.customize(restTemplate);
		return myCustomSender(zipkin, restTemplate);
	}