This is a plugin to the Elasticsearch storage component, which uses HTTP by way of Armeria and Jackson. This uses Elasticsearch 5+ features, but is tested against Elasticsearch 7-8.x and OpenSearch 2.x.
Most users will supply a DNS name that's mapped to multiple A or AAAA
records. For example, http://elasticsearch:9200
will use normal host
lookups to get the list of IP addresses, though you can alternatively supply
a list of http base urls. In either case, all the resolved IP addresses
from all provided hosts will be iterated over round-robin, with requests made
only to healthy addresses.
Here are some examples:
http://1.1.1.1:9200,http://2.2.2.2:19200
http://1.1.1.1:9200,http://[2001:db8::c001]:9200
http://elasticsearch:9200,http://1.2.3.4:9200
http://elasticsearch-1:9200,http://elasticsearch-2:9200
Spans are stored in version 2 format, which is the same as the v2 POST endpoint with one difference described below. We add a "timestamp_millis" field to aid in integration with other tools.
Zipkin's timestamps are in epoch microseconds, which is not a supported date type in Elasticsearch / OpenSearch. In consideration of tools like like Kibana, this component adds "timestamp_millis" when writing spans. This is mapped to the Elasticsearch / OpenSearch date type, so can be used to any date-based queries.
Spans are stored into daily indices, for example spans with a timestamp falling on 2016/03/19 will be stored in the index named 'zipkin:span-2016-03-19' or 'zipkin-span-2016-03-19' if using Elasticsearch version 7 or higher. There is no support for TTL through this SpanStore. It is recommended instead to use Elastic Curator to remove indices older than the point you are interested in.
The daily index format can be adjusted in two ways. You can change the
index prefix from 'zipkin' to something else. You can also change
the date separator from '-' to something else.
ElasticsearchStorage.Builder.index
and ElasticsearchStorage.Builder.dateSeparator
control the daily index format.
For example, using Elasticsearch 7+, spans with a timestamp falling on 2016/03/19 end up in the index 'zipkin-span-2016-03-19'. When the date separator is '.', the index would be 'zipkin-span-2016.03.19'.
The Zipkin api implies aggregation and exact match (keyword) on string
fields named traceId
and name
and serviceName
. Indexing on these
fields is limited to 256 characters eventhough storage is currently
unbounded.
To support the zipkin query api, a special index field named _q
is
added to documents, containing annotation values and tag entry pairs.
Ex: the tag "error": "500"
results in "_q":["error", "error=500"]
.
The values in q
are limited to 256 characters and searched as keywords.
You can check these manually like so:
$ curl -s 'localhost:9200/zipkin*span-2017-08-11/_search?q=_q:error=500'
The reason for special casing is around dotted name constraints. Tags are stored as a dictionary. Some keys include inconsistent number of dots (ex "error" and "error.message"). Elasticsearch / OpenSearch cannot index these as it inteprets them as fields, and dots in fields imply an object path.
Unless ElasticsearchStorage.Builder.strictTraceId
is set to false,
trace identifiers are unanalyzed keywords (exact string match). This
means that trace IDs should be written fixed length as either 16 or 32
lowercase hex characters, corresponding to 64 or 128 bit length. If
writing a custom collector in a different language, make sure you trace
identifiers the same way.
When migrating from 64 to 128-bit trace IDs,
ElasticsearchStorage.Builder.strictTraceId
will be false, and traceId
fields will be tokenized to support mixed lookup. This setting should
only be used temporarily, but is explained below.
The index template tokenizes trace identifiers to match on either 64-bit or 128-bit length. This allows span lookup by 64-bit trace ID to include spans reported with 128-bit variants of the same id. This allows interop with tools who only support 64-bit ids, and buys time for applications to upgrade to 128-bit instrumentation.
For example, application A starts a trace with a 128-bit traceId
"48485a3953bb61246b221d5bc9e6496c". The next hop, application B, doesn't
yet support 128-bit ids, B truncates traceId
to "6b221d5bc9e6496c".
When SpanStore.getTrace(toLong("6b221d5bc9e6496c"))
executes, it
is able to retrieve spans with the longer traceId
, due to tokenization
setup in the index template.
To see this in action, you can run a test command like so against one of your indexes:
# the output below shows which tokens will match on the trace id supplied.
$ curl -s 'localhost:9200/zipkin*span-2017-08-22/_analyze' -d '{
"text": "48485a3953bb61246b221d5bc9e6496c",
"analyzer": "traceId_analyzer"
}'|jq '.tokens|.[]|.token'
"48485a3953bb61246b221d5bc9e6496c"
"6b221d5bc9e6496c"
Indexing is a good default, but some sites who don't use Zipkin UI's
"Find a Trace" screen may want to disable indexing. This means templates
will opt-out of analyzing any data in span
, except traceId
. This
also means the special fields _q
and timestamp_millis
will neither
be written, nor analyzed.
Disabling search disables indexing.
Elasticsearch 7.8 introduces composable templates and deprecates legacy/v1 templates used in version prior (fully supported by OpenSearch). Merging of multiple templates with matching index patterns is no longer allowed, and Elasticsearch / OpenSearch will return error on PUT of the second template with matching index pattern and priority. Templates with matching index patterns are required to have different priorities, and Elasticsearch / OpenSearch will only use the template with the highest priority. This also means that secondary template is no longer achievable.
By default, Zipkin will use legacy template during initialization, but you can opt to use composable template by
providing ES_TEMPLATE_PRIORITY
environment variable.
You can setup an ingest pipeline to perform custom processing.
You can setup an ingest pipeline to perform custom processing.
Here's an example, which you'd setup prior to configuring Zipkin to use
it via ElasticsearchStorage.Builder.pipeline
PUT _ingest/pipeline/zipkin
{
"description" : "add collector_timestamp_millis",
"processors" : [
{
"set" : {
"field": "collector_timestamp_millis",
"value": "{{_ingest.timestamp}}"
}
}
]
}
Redundant requests to store autocomplete values are ignored for an hour to reduce load. This is implemented by DelayLimiter
Zipkin-server does not handle retention management of the trace data. Use the tools recommended by to manage data retention, or your cluster will grow indefinitely!