Traffic Trace

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

Tracing is supported over HTTP, HTTP2, and gRPC protocols. 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 trace exposition formats:

• zipkin traces in this format can be sent to many different tracing backends.
• datadog

Add a tracing backend to the mesh

Zipkin

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.mesh-observability:9411/api/v2/spans # If not using `kuma install observability` replace by any zipkin compatible collector address.

type: Mesh
name: default
tracing:
  defaultBackend: jaeger-collector
  backends:
  - name: jaeger-collector
    type: zipkin
    sampling: 100.0
    conf:
      url: http://my-jaeger-collector:9411/api/v2/spans # Replace by any zipkin compatible collector address.

Datadog

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.default.svc.cluster.local
        port: 8126
        splitService: true

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
      splitService: true

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

The splitService property determines if Datadog service names should be split based on traffic direction and destination. For example, with splitService: true and a backend service that communicates with a couple of databases, you would get service names like backend_INBOUND, backend_OUTBOUND_db1, and backend_OUTBOUND_db2 in Datadog. By default, this property is set to false.

Add TrafficTrace resource

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

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 

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

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.