Traffic Trace

This policy enables tracing logging to a third party tracing solution.

Tracing is supported over HTTP, HTTP2, and gRPC protocols in a Mesh. You must explicitly specify the protocol for each service and data plane proxy you want to enable tracing for.

You must also:

1. Add a tracing backend. You specify a tracing backend as a Mesh resource property.
2. Add a TrafficTrace resource. You pass the backend to the TrafficTrace resource.

Kuma currently supports the following backends:

• zipkin
  • Jaeger (opens new window) as the Zipkin collector. The Zipkin examples specify Jaeger, but you can modify for a Zipkin-only deployment.
• datadog

While most commonly we want all the traces to be sent to the same tracing backend, we can optionally create multiple tracing backends in a Mesh resource and store traces for different paths of our service traffic in different backends by leveraging Kuma tags. This is especially useful when we want traces to never leave a world region, or a cloud, for example.

Add Jaeger backend

On Kubernetes you can deploy Jaeger automatically in a kuma-tracing namespace with kumactl install tracing | kubectl apply -f -.

apiVersion: kuma.io/v1alpha1
kind: Mesh
metadata:
  name: default
spec:
  tracing:
    defaultBackend: jaeger-collector
    backends:
    - name: jaeger-collector
      type: zipkin
      sampling: 100.0
      conf:
        url: http://jaeger-collector.kuma-tracing:9411/api/v2/spans

Apply the configuration with kubectl apply -f [..]. :::

type: Mesh
name: default
tracing:
  defaultBackend: jaeger-collector
  backends:
  - name: jaeger-collector
    type: zipkin
    sampling: 100.0
    conf:
      url: http://jaeger-collector.kuma-tracing:9411/api/v2/spans

Apply the configuration with kumactl apply -f [..] or with the HTTP API.

Add Datadog backend

Prerequisites

1. Set up the Datadog (opens new window) agent.
2. Set up APM (opens new window).
   • For Kubernetes, see the datadog documentation for setting up Kubernetes (opens new window).

If Datadog is running within Kubernetes, you can expose the APM agent port to Kuma via Kubernetes service.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: trace-svc
spec:
  selector:
    app: datadog
  ports:
    - protocol: TCP
      port: 8126
      targetPort: 8126

Apply the configuration with kubectl apply -f [..].

Set up in Kuma

apiVersion: kuma.io/v1alpha1
kind: Mesh
metadata:
  name: default
spec:
  tracing:
    defaultBackend: datadog-collector
    backends:
    - name: datadog-collector
      type: datadog
      sampling: 100.0
      conf:
        address: trace-svc.datadog.svc.cluster.local
        port: 8126

where trace-svc is the name of the Kubernetes Service you specified when you configured the Datadog APM agent.

Apply the configuration with kubectl apply -f [..].

type: Mesh
name: default
tracing:
  defaultBackend: datadog-collector
  backends:
  - name: datadog-collector
    type: datadog
    sampling: 100.0
    conf:
      address: 127.0.0.1
      port: 8126

Apply the configuration with kumactl apply -f [..] or with the HTTP API.

The defaultBackend property specifies the tracing backend to use if it's not explicitly specified in the TrafficTrace resource.

Add TrafficTrace resource

Next, create TrafficTrace resources that specify how to collect traces, and which backend to store them in.

apiVersion: kuma.io/v1alpha1
kind: TrafficTrace
mesh: default
metadata:
  name: trace-all-traffic
spec:
  selectors:
  - match:
      kuma.io/service: '*'
  conf:
    backend: jaeger-collector # or the name of any backend defined for the mesh 

Apply the configuration with kubectl apply -f [..].

type: TrafficTrace
name: trace-all-traffic
mesh: default
selectors:
- match:
    kuma.io/service: '*'
conf:
  backend: jaeger-collector # or the name of any backend defined for the mesh

Apply the configuration with kumactl apply -f [..] or with the HTTP API.

You can also add tags to apply the TrafficTrace resource only a subset of data plane proxies. TrafficTrace is a Dataplane policy, so you can specify any of the selectors tags.

Services should also be instrumented to preserve the trace chain across requests made across different services. You can instrument with a language library of your choice, or you can manually pass the following headers:

• x-request-id
• x-b3-traceid
• x-b3-parentspanid
• x-b3-spanid
• x-b3-sampled
• x-b3-flags

Configure Grafana to visualize the logs

To visualise your traces you need to have a Grafana up and running. You can install Grafana by following the information of the official page (opens new window) or use the one installed with Traffic metrics.

With Grafana installed you can configure a new datasource with url:http://jaeger-query.kuma-tracing/ so Grafana will be able to retrieve the traces from Jaeger.