155. Spring Cloud Sleuth

Spring Cloud Sleuth is an instrumentation framework for Spring Boot applications. It captures trace information and can forward traces to services like Zipkin for storage and analysis.

Google Cloud Platform provides its own managed distributed tracing service called Stackdriver Trace. Instead of running and maintaining your own Zipkin instance and storage, you can use Stackdriver Trace to store traces, view trace details, generate latency distributions graphs, and generate performance regression reports.

This Spring Cloud GCP starter can forward Spring Cloud Sleuth traces to Stackdriver Trace without an intermediary Zipkin server.

Maven coordinates, using Spring Cloud GCP BOM:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-gcp-starter-trace</artifactId>
</dependency>

Gradle coordinates:

dependencies {
    compile group: 'org.springframework.cloud', name: 'spring-cloud-gcp-starter-trace'
}

You must enable Stackdriver Trace API from the Google Cloud Console in order to capture traces. Navigate to the Stackdriver Trace API for your project and make sure it’s enabled.

[Note]Note

If you are already using a Zipkin server capturing trace information from multiple platform/frameworks, you can also use a Stackdriver Zipkin proxy to forward those traces to Stackdriver Trace without modifying existing applications.

155.1 Tracing

Spring Cloud Sleuth uses the Brave tracer to generate traces. This integration enables Brave to use the StackdriverTracePropagation propagation.

A propagation is responsible for extracting trace context from an entity (e.g., an HTTP servlet request) and injecting trace context into an entity. A canonical example of the propagation usage is a web server that receives an HTTP request, which triggers other HTTP requests from the server before returning an HTTP response to the original caller. In the case of StackdriverTracePropagation, first it looks for trace context in the x-cloud-trace-context key (e.g., an HTTP request header). The value of the x-cloud-trace-context key can be formatted in three different ways:

  • x-cloud-trace-context: TRACE_ID
  • x-cloud-trace-context: TRACE_ID/SPAN_ID
  • x-cloud-trace-context: TRACE_ID/SPAN_ID;o=TRACE_TRUE

TRACE_ID is a 32-character hexadecimal value that encodes a 128-bit number.

SPAN_ID is an unsigned long. Since Stackdriver Trace doesn’t support span joins, a new span ID is always generated, regardless of the one specified in x-cloud-trace-context.

TRACE_TRUE can either be 0 if the entity should be untraced, or 1 if it should be traced. This field forces the decision of whether or not to trace the request; if omitted then the decision is deferred to the sampler.

If a x-cloud-trace-context key isn’t found, StackdriverTracePropagation falls back to tracing with the X-B3 headers.

155.2 Spring Boot Starter for Stackdriver Trace

Spring Boot Starter for Stackdriver Trace uses Spring Cloud Sleuth and auto-configures a StackdriverSender that sends the Sleuth’s trace information to Stackdriver Trace.

All configurations are optional:

Name

Description

Required

Default value

spring.cloud.gcp.trace.enabled

Auto-configure Spring Cloud Sleuth to send traces to Stackdriver Trace.

No

true

spring.cloud.gcp.trace.project-id

Overrides the project ID from the Spring Cloud GCP Module

No

 

spring.cloud.gcp.trace.credentials.location

Overrides the credentials location from the Spring Cloud GCP Module

No

 

spring.cloud.gcp.trace.credentials.encoded-key

Overrides the credentials encoded key from the Spring Cloud GCP Module

No

 

spring.cloud.gcp.trace.credentials.scopes

Overrides the credentials scopes from the Spring Cloud GCP Module

No

 

spring.cloud.gcp.trace.num-executor-threads

Number of threads used by the Trace executor

No

4

spring.cloud.gcp.trace.authority

HTTP/2 authority the channel claims to be connecting to.

No

 

spring.cloud.gcp.trace.compression

Name of the compression to use in Trace calls

No

 

spring.cloud.gcp.trace.deadline-ms

Call deadline in milliseconds

No

 

spring.cloud.gcp.trace.max-inbound-size

Maximum size for inbound messages

No

 

spring.cloud.gcp.trace.max-outbound-size

Maximum size for outbound messages

No

 

spring.cloud.gcp.trace.wait-for-ready

Waits for the channel to be ready in case of a transient failure

No

false

You can use core Spring Cloud Sleuth properties to control Sleuth’s sampling rate, etc. Read Sleuth documentation for more information on Sleuth configurations.

For example, when you are testing to see the traces are going through, you can set the sampling rate to 100%.

spring.sleuth.sampler.probability=1                     # Send 100% of the request traces to Stackdriver.
spring.sleuth.web.skipPattern=(^cleanup.*|.+favicon.*)  # Ignore some URL paths.

Spring Cloud GCP Trace does override some Sleuth configurations:

  • Always uses 128-bit Trace IDs. This is required by Stackdriver Trace.
  • Does not use Span joins. Span joins will share the span ID between the client and server Spans. Stackdriver requires that every Span ID within a Trace to be unique, so Span joins are not supported.
  • Uses StackdriverHttpClientParser and StackdriverHttpServerParser by default to populate Stackdriver related fields.

155.3 Integration with Logging

Integration with Stackdriver Logging is available through the Stackdriver Logging Support. If the Trace integration is used together with the Logging one, the request logs will be associated to the corresponding traces. The trace logs can be viewed by going to the Google Cloud Console Trace List, selecting a trace and pressing the Logs → View link in the Details section.

155.4 Sample

A sample application and a codelab are available.